LINKING FREE BONUS -liNIScIENT ONPAGE exgianuss FLOATE WwTable of Contents ‘What Is Internal Linking? Content Silos: A Primer Building An Internal Linking Strategy & Campaign #1 - Identify your target pages #2 - Find The Best Pages You Could Link To The Page #3 - Structure your internal linking What's Wrong With Your Internal Linking (And How to Fix Them) ‘Too Many (Internal) Links On The Page Not Enough Internal Links On The Page SS But My Page Doesn't Have Internal Links Pointing To It aN Too Far Away From The Homepage pe intemal Links Are NoFollow S Crowded Faceted Navigation Vad What Is Link Sculpting? What is Link Flow? Vv How To Improve Link Flow Remove links from WordPress ter Optimize Anchor Texts The Link Must Be Close To iy) inking Factors Link Only To Pages Rel s Target Keyword Conclusion What Is Internal Linking? Internal linking is the process of linking pages from within a website. coe an 10 " 12 12 13 13 4 15 16 7 19 19 19 20 24 22 22Here's an example of an internal link: (TITAN wuerwese mer casters mice Ano cower these 10 tips from Titan Growth. The site (Titan Growth) links to its SEO page using thi ee Q “SEO” The reason why sites need to do internal linking from toa useful page on your site. Its possible to link away from your site, oa to another website. This type of link is called r perspective is to help direct visitors an external or outbound link content, link to those instead. TKis way, internal links also keep users from bouncing away from However, if you have a page on y hat visitors would find useful in the context of the vyour site. eo Now, from an SEO standoory. search. internal linking is VERY CRITICAL to your success in organic First, you get new pages indexed faster by search spiders. Normally, it takes time before Google can crawl and index newly published pages on your site, But if you link to it from other related pages of your site, you help inform search spiders that you have a new page based on the number of internal links pointing to it. As a result, Google can easily find the new page and craw! it for indexing. Second, and arguably the most important benefit of internal links, is it helps page rank higher on SERPs. If you're wondering why your target pages aren't ranking on Google, make sure that internal links are pointing to each of them,‘They are one way of saying to search engines that the page is important based on the volume and quality of pages linking back to it. The more intemal links a page has from authoritative pages of your site, the higher its chances of ranking on SERPs! This has been proven time and again. Case in point, InLinks, a content optimization tool, rolled out an intemal linking strategy using automated scripts that Google bots can craw Not surprisingly, all of the three pages they built internal links for reached the first page of SERPs. Traffic & Keywords statistics, 300 © Average Ranking 200 + Trae The image above was optimized Coeur keyword. It took 92 internal links to that page alone to get it up from the 18th psitign to the 8th for its target keyword. The lesser the one 8 of a keyword, the fewer intemal links it needs to rank on the first ‘And this is part of the a page! On the same case study, a low keyword difficulty, i.e. easy to rank for, started ranking on the 3rd Position within 1.5 months after pointing 8 internal links to it. Fast forward to 3 years later, Spencer Haws of Niche Pursuits experimented on how much traffic his pages could get just through internal links. ‘After 3 months and building 108 internal inks (an average of 2.3 links per post), almost 77% of his pages increased their rankings and traffic!He built the internal links using Link Whisper, a Notuptess plugin he developed and is selling. | highly recommend you try this tool out if yo. ig for a quick and easy way to point internal links to your target pages. Of course, things just don’t happen i favs ycuum. In this case, Spencer made it clear that intemal links may not be the only factor, d the spike in trafic. It could also be because of the content’s age - the longer the pa¥e pas been published, the more authority it builds up over time Nonetheless, this doe: inplay the value that internal links bring to the table. It's easy to argue that the bur janic traffic wouldn't take place without the links. The results go to show more than just the power of internal links. Because they are different factors involved in ranking pages using this type of link. You can't expect to rank after x months after injecting x amount of internal links to one of your pages. In other words: You need to develop a plan in your internal linking to ensure that you're pointing the right links to your target pages. So how do we do that?Content Silos: A Primer I've discussed content silos in depth. You can read what I've said about this topic in my SEQ. ‘Side Hustle @Book and in the main Omniscient Onpage SEO eBook. But it's impossible NOT to talk about content silos/content clusters when dealing with Ina nutshell, content silos are groups of pages in your site that tackle the same topic or theme. Here's a visual representation of a content Cara) ines Ifthe site is about , you can create different silos covering subtopics related to power tools, ie. cordless, gas-powered. Under each topic are supporting pages that dig deeper into the silo. For cordless power tools, you can break it down to drills, planers, hammers. All these are types of power tools, which is why creating pages about them on your site makes sense, ‘The reason why content silos are a valuable component in your on-page SEO approach is they help increase your site's relevance to your topic. Going back to the image above, Google will see this site as an authority in the topic of power tools because it extensively covers its different subtopics. There are pages dedicated to different types of power tools.‘And because the keywords you use for each page have a strong correlation to “power tools,” Google will be able to connect the dots and allow the site to rank higher for keywords under its topic. ‘So how do you build silos such as the one above? You guessed it: internal links. All pages in a silo, from the target page down to its supporting pages, are joined together by links. How they link with each other depends on you. You can have all your supporting pages link to the silo’s target page and vice versa. Or you could have just the target page linking out to them. There's also the possibilty of linking the supporting pages with each other, There's no wrong answer here - it ultimately depends on what kind of ialbtpal linking approach ‘works best for you. So you need to test out different methods and,see which one delivers the best results. NOTE: Don't link away from your silo! You want to keep y¢ aa into themselves. with your site. Kyle Roof of High Voltage SEO advocates for thi fic internal linking structure for his content silos: erse Silo Ey i etona pnt st In the same video, Clint Butler has this for his silo structure (specifically geared towards local businesses):Local: Multi-location, @ Multi-service Location? * Locstens Page Serce2 Building An Internal Linking Sti & Campaign For starters, there are many ways yor a tool like Link Whisper mentioned for you skin a cat concerning internal links. You could use {0 automate internal linking or at least make it easier However, Il be discussing 1 campaign from scratcly-¥ roll up your sleeves as\yo Let's get started: #1 - Identify your target pages eo te manual process of building your internal linking 6n't have to pay for tools using this method, but you'll have to Getting down and dirty using Google SERPs. Below are qualifiers to help you determine what your potential target page looks like: Ranks on the second page of Google for a very lucrative keyword, i.e. high search volume. ‘© Apage that covers one of the core topics of your site, ex. “Cordless power tools" (page topic) for “power tools” (site topic). Has a flawed internal linking approach (we'll talk more about this later).There are probably more you can add here. But the idea is clear: you want to focus on an important page of your site that's already ranking on Google. The internal links you'll build to it should help tip the scales to its favor and make it rank higher on Google, if not at the very top! #2 - Find The Best Pages You Could Link To The Page Not all internal links are equal. A link coming from an authoritative page will produce a much more powerful intemal link as opposed to a brand-new page or one that has no backlinks/intemal links. Therefore, what you want is to find powerful pages related to the target page. To do that, you need to download Mozbar or something similar to help you identify pages with the highest Page Authority (PA) on SERPS. You will also need to sign up foha free Moz account to make this work. XN ones downs, pens sachsen owe: Cy Site:[site URL] [keyword] Q Replace [site URL] with your domain URL and [ke} the target page's keyword. Let's say | own rascalrides.com site and want to, wees intérnal inks to a page optimized for ‘mountain bikes for kids.” ~ Vv entered site:https://rascalrides.com oe 8 for kids on Google search. Here's how it should look like: DS ee Howroar'eKThere are 411 results for the query. That means there are over 400 pages (excluding the target Page) on my site about mountain bikes for kids, Using Google to find out the pages in your site related to your keyword allows you to determine ‘what pages the search engine values. The fact that these pages appear on top of SERPs means that Google thinks they're the most important ones you're site has for the keyword. However, you'll need another metric to qualify which among the pages that appear here are truly authoritative. This is where Mozbar comes in handy. Under each search result is the Moz data. Focus on their respective PA, which determines the authority of a page based on different SEO factors. The higher the DA, the more authoritative it is, You can then export the results into a spreadsheet so you can drill dows sults much better. #3 - Structure yOUr internal linking Open the downloaded sheet to see the list of pages you can place a link to your target page (if you haven't yet).already downloaded the top 10 pages found by Google. You can ex, search results to 100 and download all results from each page. Then combine "ty ine Single sheet for easy viewing, From here, check the Page Authority. The assumptior that all pages are related to mountain bikes for kids. Now, find the pages with re "A and find a way to contextually link to your target page on the page. For this example, we'll ust stick with what we have. ‘The goal is to funnel in as much authority sse pages down to your target page in the hopes of increasing its rankings on Goc internal linking, ‘At the same time, take the care to i content silos using the page you found in your initial research. Of the silo templates above or come up with your own - the a.silo that makes sense to your visitors and search engines. ‘As mentioned, you can s\ important thing is that What's Wrong Let’s say you already have rolled out your internal linking plan before. However, you're not getting the results you expected from it for various reasons. ith Your Internal Linking (And How to Fix Them) In this part, we'll talk about what these possible causes are and how you can remedy them to ensure that you're getting the most out of your internal links. ‘You can find most of the issues discussed before using your site auditor tool of choice. But for discussion, I'll share with you screenshots of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. It's a free tool you can Use to analyze sites you own for free - all you need to do is confirm that they're yours viaToo Many (Internal) Links On The Page ‘To be fair, there's no actual count as to the number of internal inks you can place within a page. However, consider thi ‘The more links you have on your page (whether intemal or external), the more authority that ‘escapes from it, This is the prevailing wisdom regarding link volume within a page. Therefore, if you want to rank a page, limit the number of links it has. How to find internal links in a page using Ahrefs: Click on Page explorer under Tools on the sidebar. Then scroll down to, of pages and order them according to descending order. XN ae Ww = —=='T ss - = ® ® be oO =: —— aS a ® - = -& e This should show you the pages with the most number of internal links. From here, determine ‘ways on how to decrease them. Not Enough Internal Links On The Page Similar to the one above, there is no figure to work with regarding the minimum number of internal links. The best approach here is to always have at least one point to another page on your site especially if your page isn't ranking even after optimizing for other factors.Ideally, you want the authority/ink juice/PageRank in your silo to circulate across all its pages. ‘And by linking out from your target page to a supporting page, you help close the cycle and allow for the circulation to occur. ‘As a result, you help increase the semantic relevance of the silo to your site's topic. As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. And if the byproduct of your internal linking leads to increase link juice flow, then all your pages will experience a cumulative lift on SERPs, How to find internal links on Ahrefs: Follow the same process above in finding internal links. This time, organize the pages according to the least number of inlinks. But My Page Doesn't Have Internal Links Pointing To It toit from its site. This best describes an orphaned page. I's a page that has no 2S for its keyword more acknowledging that it exists ‘As mentioned, the lack of internal links makes crawling and i difficult for search spiders. They can't find a page that the si via a link, even if i's listed down on the sitemaps. By following the process of building an internal lin properly place them in their respective silos. > Apossible reason why you didn't link to it, ‘not good enough or it's irelevant to your oie ple 2 poge toe bet essing one ier no ted tent), you can just delete it and move on. ire manually, you should be able to Either way, you could either transfer delete this page, Then redirect age to it (ifit contains bare Too Far Away Fr Homepage It's possible for yollnpage to have internal links but still not crawled and indexed by search. spiders. The main reason for this is because they're linked far away from the homepage. The distance of a page from the homepage based on internal links is called crawl depth. For example, if a page has a craw! depth of 5, that means it takes 5 pages from the homepage before a user will stumble onto the page. Ideally, you want to bring the craw! depth of your pages as low as possible. The approach will depend on the site you have. How to find the craw! depth of your pages on Ahrefs: Click on Page explorer under Tools. Scroll down to the page and order the list of pages according to the descending order of crawl pages.i 7 i } i i sec ett nt ct rn np NO For blogs, it's easy to link them all from your hot at least from target pages that the homepage links to. This way, you'd have not mot a click depth of 3 across all pages. i For more complex sites like online shops, to how e-commerce si page properly (similar to the local cofttensilo featured above) to bring them closer to your home = S Internal Links Are Nofollow links out \oritylink juice/PageRank to the page that i's pointing to. So even if you have @Wwell-structured content silo, Google won't acknowledge the link structure due to the nofollow tag attached to all internal inks. As a result, its like your silo isn't in a silo at all! ducing your click depth will be very challenging due By default, all links are set to dofollow on WordPress. They only become nofollow if: 1. You manually added the rel=nofollow tag on all your site (which could take you forever, depending on how big your site is) 2. You're using a plugin that sets all links to nofollow (internal links included) Ideally, you'd want the natural flow of authority across pages in your silo for internal, to take effect. That means all intemal links should be set to dofollow.However, welll discuss later that nofollow has its uses especially if you want to squeeze every last drop of link juice you have to your target pages. Links To Redirect or Redirect Chains Using redirects helps broken and no-longer-existing page point to the new and correct URL version of the page. This makes the process of fixing broken links in your site much easier. Instead of manually taking down the bad links and replacing them with the correct ones, the redirection rule lets you fix the issue in minutes. However, redirection becomes a problem if you deliberately link to the redirects instead of the page. Initially, what happens during a redirect is that link A (the broken link) will befetched first. Once the servers pick up on the fact that link Ais now pointing to link B (the" k), it will then load that page instead. Ina way, redirects make the site load slower due to the num wei it takes before the correct page properly loads. However, in cases where sa Beh of backlinks pointing to the broken page, it's much more convenient to create a jou Going back to redirect chains, if redirects links to redirects! and other redirects, the long wait it takes for users and search engines may be too bear. More importantly, you lose link equity if diminishes its power after every redirect Pp passing it to redirects! Because the link ot maximizing your links this way. In this case, you have to get dows make sure that all links point to To find out on Ahrefs, go, many redirect ch has. x with your site by untangling the redirect chain to rrect versions of the URL. it and click on Redirects under Reports. You'll see how== ° be Y- ee ‘search query with a few clicks of a button. Crowded Faceted Navigation Cbhecoeeememenreimepenzers,, Newpuowthocs haan sso Sb bapa it SsaeanoSS OC This is a useful feature for customers looking to narrow down the results based on their specifications and increase conversions. However, having too many filters can be bad for your faceted navigation.They work similar to links - having more than enough filters can dilute your link equity because it passes through the different filters you created on your site. Therefore, you need to strike a balance between usability and SEO. What Is Link Sculpting? Now that we've discussed internal links in-depth, it's time we hop onto link sculpting, I's not as prevalent nowadays as before, which welll get into later, but sculpture your links could play @ massive role in getting the right amount of link juice to the appropriate pages in your site Link sculpting is the practice of “manipulating” search engines on the distribution of link juice/authority/PageRank in the pages of your site. ‘The goal is to stop the flow of authority to unimportant pages and get me. flowing to the important ones, ie. target pages. Remember nofollow links and how you should ideally set yo dofollow? Well, in the concept of internal linking, nofollow links are a must. O Here’s an example: Ihave a page containing 5 links. Each link is of ae which means all § links have 20% authority (5 x 20 = 100%). By using nofollow to sculpt your links, a rive more power to your dofollow links. So if 2 out of the 5 links are esconlnes that means the 3 dofollow links have 33.3% authority (3 33.3 = 100%). This is beca nofollow links are taken out of consideration. In this case, you can nofo Sf your links except for that 1 link that you want to point to your target page. As ar age with the dofollow link gets ALL the juice, thus boosting its chances of ranking ERPs. However, SEOs calght on to this tactic and are now nofollowing all inks except for a handful that points to pages they want to increase authority to. This caused Google to render link sculpting obsolete:Old PageRank Algorithm & Effect of Nofollow Sculpting Tink ui ‘HEA ik juice X/5, Linke ——lnktulce x15 Line ¢ —_Wnbsulce 205 li dene ink juice X/5 Unk = link ice 75 ti 4 Link A juice Xf Hace nofollow Link ¢ ——limksuie 34 Link Dlink julee x74 Link ——lmlsice x74 Page with *X* ar S Page with "x" amount un of passable link juice of me New PageRank eal & Effect of Nofollow Sci ng Nofollowing a link no Link A longer passes more juice through the Link B ee remaining live links. fk juice x/5 Link, LM insets ey oO. E link juice X15 5 Page With "x" amount of passable link juice Therefore, if you have 5 links and 2 of them are nofollow, that means the 3 remaining dofollow links pass 20% authority even if the nofollow links don't. Its because Google no longer considers nofollow links the same it did and distributes the authority to all the links on the page, regardless of link type. Up to this day, the ineffectiveness of link sculpting has been the long-standing belief amongst SEOs. However, based on my testing and the studies conducted by others, link sculpting still works and remains to have a place in your onpage SEO strategy!Again, it all boils down to testing what works and what doesn't. Just because Google says something, doesn't mean it's gospel truth ("guest blogging is dead,” anyone?). That said, this doesn't get you carte blanche to abuse link sculpting to your benefit. You always. need to proceed with caution especially to restrain yourself from going overboard with this tactic. What Is Link Flow? ‘At this point, you should be aware that not all links have the same weight. One can’t be too sure how the algorithm takes into account the different factors at play (anchor text, relevance, proximity to ranking factors) ‘And because there's no way for anyone to compute a weight of a link, youave to treat each one equally as its the simplest way to proceed with ths. With that said, what's left to measure is the link flow going from op ‘going to another. In fayman’s terms, link flow refers to the volume of outbound, outbound links you have, the lower the authority of the pay Ls) of a page. The more es. ‘That's why I've mentioned here multiple times that y to control, f not reduce, the number of outbound links to sustain the page's, = How To Improve Link Flow a Link flow plays a crucial role in scuh much juice as possible from the i internal links because you want to extract as ur page. In this part, you will learn h each based on different 1 the links in your site pages, but only improve the quality of ctors. Remove links fré ordPress templates When talking about OBLs, I'm also referring to the following links: © Menu links © Footer links © Sidebar links © "Read more’ links © imagerfeatured image links © EtcSo even if you reduce the links in the content body, it wouldn't be of much help if you still have the link above on the page. Therefore, your goal now is to remove these builtin inks from your WordPress (or any CMS) site. First, you need to identify the common links that appear on all pages of your site. Run the Check My Links Chrome extension on the page to see where the links outside of the content body appear. This gives you an idea of where. 1nd how to remove them if need be. Next, editing them out of yo customize your site's des depend on the theme you're using. Some allow you to u can remove links from the menu, footer, sidebar, and others. Ityou're not conan Nn ‘customizing your site's links, you need to ask for professional help, Optimize Anchor Texts The anchor text you use for your internal links matter. Ideally, you want to use LSI (latent semantic index) or related keywords as your anchor text If the keyword of your page is “nike basketball shoes,” you may want to use the following: * Nike shoes © Nike basketball shoes low cut © Jordan basketball shoesTo help you come up with additional ideas, use the Keyword Surfer Chrome extension to find similar keywords to your target phrase. Google ements Smwann Xo Using generic words and phrases like “click here,” " page enough for Google to understand the correlatior .” and others don't describe the een the anchor text and the link. This is a pretty common practice among lin to help get more juice from the site they're acquiring backlinks from. The same princi ies to internal linking The Link Must Be Close Tc inst Ranking Factors Below are onpage ranking need to optimize your keyword with: 1. URL SEO title Hi title ‘Subheadings (H2, H3, etc.) 5. Imagelait text ‘With these in mind, you need to place your links near these page elements. Realistically, you can do this for your H7 title, subheadings, and images. Since Google values these elements more than others, the value also rubs on to the elements near it as well.‘As usual, there's no specific number or figure to determine how near or far your link should be concerning these elements. But just make them as close as you can in the context of your content. Link Only To Pages Relevant To Its Target Keyword ‘We're just repeating what we've already talked about regarding content silos. Stick to pages within your silo to increase the topical relevance of your pages with your site's theme. Conclusion And thats it! Internal linking is a real mix of art and maths. You want to get the most out of your internal links without making it look too unnatural or over-optimized, This free bonus guide should have given you all the tools to carry gut yup own intemal linking campaigns and analyse them quickly and efficiently. . ‘Thank you once again for purchasing Omnscient OnPage. Q ful: Fob & O Q O Ww