SEOs love to talk about links and they also love donuts. And they should, talk about
links I mean, because links are a really important part of any SEO program... and
donuts? Donuts are just the best!
Donuts? Yeah, I'm coming!
Okay.
Let's focus back on the links.
Shall we? Do you know that you have total control on a lot of links that
can really determine the success of your SEO strategy and that all those
links are right under your nose?
Yes, I'm talking about internal links.
So as we talked about in the most common SEO mistakes video, if you haven't
seen it, I'll leave it right here,
doing internal linking is really just a matter of doing the basics
well and investing just a little bit of time to check things manually.
So let's go and see how to build an internal linking strategy that works.
Let's see the plan!
So since we're enjoying donuts, let's imagine we're running a website for a bakery.
Step one.
You'll want to identify the pages of your website, that target high volume
keywords, and then develop them as what we'll call hub pages for our site,
we could set up hub pages for cakes, donuts, pastries, pies, and bread as the hubs.
You want to avoid picking too many hub pages,
just keep them to the essential.
And I think we got all the essentials right here ;)
Right?
Next: map out what fits under each hub page. Under the cake's hub page,
for example, you could have birthday cakes, graduation cakes, wedding
cakes, company event cakes, or even funny cakes that make you smile.
Third step: you want to consider setting up one more level below each of these
clusters. Under birthday cakes,
for example, you could set up sub categories, such as cakes for kids and cakes for
adults, or it could be whole wheat or gluten free under your bread hubs.
Just think through your products and audiences to segment these the best way.
You might need to bribe your dev folks with some Donuts for this one, but it's valuable.
This hierarchy should become the basis for your main navigational internal links,
also known as the nav bar.
If this isn't the case, work with the dev team to make sure your site's navigation
actually aligns with these hubs and clusters. And the fifth and final prep step
is tackling contextual internal links.
What are we talking about here?
Contextual internal links are typically placed within the main body content
of a page and are important because they helps users find additionally
related information they may need.
Plus, internal links also pass authority to the page they're
Linking to, and help search engines
understand your site.
Remember Google is always crawling your pages.
And what we want to do is help the machine understand everything about it.
People and the bot both need to know.
But, hey, you're not alone in doing this.
SEMrush has a lot of great tools that can help you exactly do this. The easiest way
to audit internal links is to jump right into the SEMrush Internal Linking report
in the Site Audit tool. It quickly shows the strongest and weakest links on the site.
Use this to identify errors warnings and notices regarding your site's internal links
and make the suggested changes to your site.
The Site Audit tool can really give you some powerful insights on your internal linking.
Let's see what the five main sections are.
The first one is the pages crawl depth: with this.
you can actually understand the crawl depths of your website, and don't forget your sites
most important pages should be reachable within three clicks of the homepage.
Yeah, people don't want to click around to find what they want.
Internal links; here,
you will see how many pages receive internal links and how many are
internally linking to others.
You will also be able to identify any orphan pages, which we'll talk about in a minute.
Then we have internal link distribution.
You can identify pages that have a weak internal link rank, and
why a URL's rank is considered weak.
The tool will suggest what to do next. Internal link issues:
this tool lets you see issues such as broken links, errors, warnings or
notices related to internal links.
And last but not least, we have pages passing most internal link rank.
Yeah, that's a mouthful.
Here you can see the pages that have the most influence on other pages.
This is so powerful because it helps you understand which are the most
authoritative pages on your website.
And if you yourself don't know, which are the most powerful pages
on your website, how can Google?
Now that you have all these insights, I'll let you play with
SEMrush and your own brilliance
To create powerful internal linking.
But also, I just want to tell you a couple of mistakes to avoid that
I think will be helpful to you.
First one, don't add too many links on a page, standard SEO rules apply. Too many links
make a page look spammy, and it can affect ranking.
Be choosy about the few links you add to ensure your users
go to highly credible sources.
Number two is: don't forget to audit using SEMrush regularly. When creating new
content that replaces older content, make sure links within your site that go to
the old URL are updated to the new URL.
Next off, since we're talking about links, let's also not forget to audit
the external ones from your site.
When you link to external sites, you give your authority away.
If a link is broken, check the site for a new link, contact the owner to
see if they'll fix it or remove it.
Your users deserve the best experience possible from your site.
Next off, assess no follow links and make sure they're needed and use them sparingly.
There are two examples of when you might want a no-follow: first is to
prevent bots from following links to registration or other forms.
The other is adding a no-follow to an external sources link,
if you feel you can trust the site or the site is spammy.
Identify any orphan site map pages:
you can do that in SEMrush's internal linking status notices.
Orphan pages are often low quality forgotten pages that add no value to the users.
You can often redirect the domains to quality pages within your website.
Occasionally, a page can end up orphaned during the redesign.
Checking for orphan pages can help you find an add them back to
the navigation within the site.
Oh, one more thing just popped into my head.
It can happen,
and I'm sure it has happened to you that a lot of times you find old content URLs
that are HTTP, but make sure you change those into HTTPS because this is a really
MUST to avoid mixed content errors.
You think I'm not seeing you?
I know that, I can see you from here that you're rolling your
eyes: "Changing to HTTPS.
It's going to take a week of work,
It has to be done manually".
If you bribe your favorite developer with their favorite donut in exchange
for a massive HTTPS tweak, you no longer have to be the one to do it.
Try this and let me know in the comments
if it works.
So that was it, guys, for this tutorial to set up your internal linking strategy.
Let me know what are your techniques, and if there are any other mistakes
that I couldn't think of, I will be reading you in the comments below.
Thank you so much for listening.
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Thanks again.
I'll catch you guys in the next one.
Bye.