This is a Guest Post by Rob Stretch, Contact us to be a Guest blogger on TechZoomIn.

Unless you’re new in the online game, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Bloggers talk about it. Search engine optimizers and online marketers certainly mention it in their blog posts. But what is link juice really and what constitutes great Quality juice?

Link juice is the currency of Google. It is not the only criteria Google uses to assign SERP ranking, but it is certainly the most important to monitor. In simplest terms, link juice is a measure of how inbound links affect your Google rankings.

Most of us reading this post know that generally a site with more inbound links will rank better on the search engine. But not all links were created equal. Inbound links from some websites and blogs have more of a positive correlation to search engine ranking. Simply put, these sites have more link juice.

What makes a link juicy?

A good link Building campaign will strive for quality over quantity. While it is good to have a large amount of links (assuming they are natural and the anchor text is varied), many times a few links to high authority websites will Do the work of a hundred lower quality links. So what makes a site high authority?

#1 Domain and Extension

Simply having a domain with rich keywords will raise the link juice of your site. Similarly, an authority extension like a .com, .org, and .net will almost always outrank other extensions.

#2 Age

The longer a site has been crawled and indexed by the search engines, the better it will rank.

#3 Quantity of links

Don’t be mistaken, the quantity of backlinks a site has is important. The combined link juice of all of the linking sites will factor in the websites SERPs.

#4 Quality of links

This is the link juice of all of the linking pages. Does the site link to high quality pages with lots of link juice?

#5 Variety of links

Does the site link to a variety of blogs, static pages, .coms, .orgs, .nets? What is the variety of linking pages like?

#6 Natural linking

Search engines like a sites links to look organic. Did the site slowly and steadily attain its links? Is the anchor text varied? If it looks like a site purchased links in any way, this violates the search engines’ terms of service and raises red flags.

#7 Internal attributes

Internal SEO is also at play. Is the site clean and easy-to-navigate? Are the meta tags used properly. Does it have a clear site map and internal linking structure?

After examining all of these attributes, you should have a clear idea of if a website is worth reaching out to for a link to yours. A great tool to utilize is SEO Book’s Toolbar. This will tell you a websites page rank (PR), backlinks to the domain, and backlinks to the page, among other things.

Remember, in the link game, anchor text is king. For example, I work for a company that handles VA loans. I would never use “click here” or “follow this link” as anchor text to link back to our website. I would use something along the lines of VA Guidelines, providing us value by linking a keyword in our industry back to a deep page on our website.

Link juice can be pretty complicated, but with the right knowledge and Tools, you can use it to your advantage to drive higher quality links to your website.

Rob Stretch is a marketing major at the University of Missouri, graduating in May. He works part time in VA Mortgage Center online marketing team.