Question for the SEO gurus

[PeterShene]

I want to know something specific about internal linking. Ive looked online and whilst there are many theories on what internal linking should be thy are covering the exact topic that im looking for.

Say i have a home page right and it contains brief descriptions on service dogs, cats, peaches .

Then i have linked in my nav internal pages focusing on service dogs2 , cats2 ,peaches2.

So lets say i want my home page to rank better for topic "dogs".

On dogs2 should i make a link to a containing the anchor-text keyword "dogs" back to the home page.

I realise there probably isnt going to be solid answer for this but heck its worth a shot.

 

[easyhostmedia]

I want to know something specific about internal linking. Ive looked online and whilst there are many theories on what internal linking should be thy are covering the exact topic that im looking for.

Say i have a home page right and it contains brief descriptions on service dogs, cats, peaches .

Then i have linked in my nav internal pages focusing on service dogs2 , cats2 ,peaches2.

So lets say i want my home page to rank better for topic "dogs".

On dogs2 should i make a link to a containing the anchor-text keyword "dogs" back to the home page.

I realise there probably isnt going to be solid answer for this but heck its worth a shot.

send a message to Conor as he is the one that can help with SEO
https://www.hostingdiscussion.com/members/28941.html

 

[bigredseo]

On dogs2 should i make a link to a containing the anchor-text keyword "dogs" back to the home page.

The short answer is YES. Internal links are very important when it comes to SEO, and association of words, get them wrong and it can really start to screw your ranking positions.

What we suggest is to assign a "keyword phrase" to each page of your site. Any time you use that phrase in your site, link back to that particular page. So if you have a bunch of pages, put it into an Excel sheet so you can track what words go where.

You CAN have multiple phrases going to the same page, but we would recommend that they're similar. In the following case, I want to rank "dog bed", specifically for the small dogs;

• small dog bed
• tiny dog bed
• dog bedding
• small dog beds on sale
• extra small dog bed

Each of those can go to your dog page if you're talking about small dogs and bedding.

Notice I used "keyword phrase" rather than "keyword"? This is because the chance that you're going to rank for "dog" is very very small. "dogs" has more than 732 million results in Google. "small dogs" has more than 15 million results, and "small dog bed" has more than 1.2 million results.

But results are one thing, searches are another. "dog beds" gets searched about 46,000 times per month but "small dog bed" gets about 500 searches a month. So choose the longer keyword phrases when they match your intended audience.

As a rule of thumb, the keyword phrase that you want to rank should adhere to each of the following:

• Should be in the Title tag of your page
• Should be in your description meta tag
• Should be in Schema Markup (if you have products on the page)
• Should be in the H1 title of your page
• Should be within the first 100 words of your page
• Should be linked from your home page content EXACTLY (anchor text)

There are more factors such as Alt Tags on images, Keyword Density (how many times the phrase is repeated versus how much text is on the page), and other factors, but in general, the above items will give you a good starting point. Don't worry about bolding or italics, they have very little value.

Any time you talk about "small dog beds", link that anchor text as is to the page you want to rank.

Don't worry so much about your Navigation in the header or footer, Google can ignore those at times. The key area you want is text in the page content itself.

Hopefully, that gives you a starting point.

As always, think of your user and use logic when you're linking things. Do not have a page talking about dog bowls and cat treats and in the middle shove a link to "dog beds" - Google (and your users) will pick up on what you're doing and that's never good.

 

[PeterShene]

The short answer is YES. Internal links are very important when it comes to SEO, and association of words, get them wrong and it can really start to screw your ranking positions.

What we suggest is to assign a "keyword phrase" to each page of your site. Any time you use that phrase in your site, link back to that particular page. So if you have a bunch of pages, put it into an Excel sheet so you can track what words go where.

You CAN have multiple phrases going to the same page, but we would recommend that they're similar. In the following case, I want to rank "dog bed", specifically for the small dogs;

• small dog bed
• tiny dog bed
• dog bedding
• small dog beds on sale
• extra small dog bed

Each of those can go to your dog page if you're talking about small dogs and bedding.

Notice I used "keyword phrase" rather than "keyword"? This is because the chance that you're going to rank for "dog" is very very small. "dogs" has more than 732 million results in Google. "small dogs" has more than 15 million results, and "small dog bed" has more than 1.2 million results.

But results are one thing, searches are another. "dog beds" gets searched about 46,000 times per month but "small dog bed" gets about 500 searches a month. So choose the longer keyword phrases when they match your intended audience.

As a rule of thumb, the keyword phrase that you want to rank should adhere to each of the following:

• Should be in the Title tag of your page
• Should be in your description meta tag
• Should be in Schema Markup (if you have products on the page)
• Should be in the H1 title of your page
• Should be within the first 100 words of your page
• Should be linked from your home page content EXACTLY (anchor text)

There are more factors such as Alt Tags on images, Keyword Density (how many times the phrase is repeated versus how much text is on the page), and other factors, but in general, the above items will give you a good starting point. Don't worry about bolding or italics, they have very little value.

Any time you talk about "small dog beds", link that anchor text as is to the page you want to rank.

Don't worry so much about your Navigation in the header or footer, Google can ignore those at times. The key area you want is text in the page content itself.

Hopefully, that gives you a starting point.

As always, think of your user and use logic when you're linking things. Do not have a page talking about dog bowls and cat treats and in the middle shove a link to "dog beds" - Google (and your users) will pick up on what you're doing and that's never good.

Clarifies pretty much what i wanted to know, thanks for taking the time to write this.

 

[webconfigure]

Bigredseo explained it very well and in detailed, very helpful. One more point I will add is, make sure there should not be more than 100 internal links per page.

 

[bigredseo]

Bigredseo explained it very well and in detailed, very helpful. One more point I will add is, make sure there should not be more than 100 internal links per page.

If you have more than 15 contextual links (not navigation links), then you're doing something wrong, unless it is "long form content" (4,000+ words per page).

For the most part, you should have no more than 1 link for every 100 words of content. There are exceptions (bullet point lists, article lists etc).

But yes, more than 100 is going to cause issues.

At the end of every page you should have your Call To Action - what do you want the user to do next - buy here, learn more, contact now, read this. NEVER leave a user guessing on what they should click next. You're driving the sale/contact, not them. That's a conversation for another thread.

 

[PeterShene]

Ok i understand the point of 100 links going out will look a little trashy to google and users. But what about footer and navigation links i did read somewhere that contextual links carry more weight than footer and navigation links.

Many people talk about silo structures im sure you've heard of the term red but many people also say just do what is useful to the user and that that is what google wants which makes sense.

I often se top ranking pages with what id call a casual link structure to say if they wrote a article about dogs and mentioned how dogs like chew toys and they happened to write a article on chew toys its as if the webmaster casually though hey i should put this here if a user wants to know about chew toys.

Its just hard to not over optimise anything on a website with competition breathing down your neck the whole time.

At the end of every page you should have your Call To Action - what do you want the user to do next - buy here, learn more, contact now, read this. NEVER leave a user guessing on what they should click next. You're driving the sale/contact, not them. That's a conversation for another thread.

I very much like this and definitely have to take a look at this on my website.

 

[bigredseo]

Don't worry about navigation links. Since they're repeated on EVERY page, Google has learned to pretty much ignore them. They know they're useful for the client, and they know that these are what you consider the "most important" pages in your site, but the real focus is on context links. These are where the real actions happen.

The Silo structure has been around for a very long time, and if you look at libraries, they're built just like a Silo. Want to know about Religion, all those books are in this corner. Want to know about fiction, they're all over here. Your website can be built in the same fashion.

Everything related to dogs is going to be linked from the DOG page. Then a user has to click to a category for "small dogs" and then get into the drilldown list for "small dog toys" and then drill another level for "pastic toys". At that point, you may have lost your user as you exceeded the "3 clicks or less" rule.

3 clicks or less <- been around a while, but I *LIVE & TEACH * by this rule. It's just plain common sense.
If a user can't find what they want in 3 clicks, you stand a VERY high chance that they will go back to Google and search again.

So, going back to Silo Structure, it does work, and it helps for organization, but when it comes to optimization you don't want people to land on the "dog" page. You want google searchers to land on "plastic chew toys".

Here's the site structure (breadcrumbs or trail of crumbs);
home > dogs > small dogs > toys > plastic chew toys > Awesome #1 toy

You want the user to land on the "Awesome #1 Toy" page and not have to go through the categories or structures.

In traditional Silos, you'd be advised to link the "Awesome #1 Toy" to each of the categories above it, or maybe just the "dog" category, which would then in theory boost the Dog page as it has so many internal links pointing to it that it must be important.

As long as each page is linked to whatever the topic is about, Google is going to figure it all out for you. You no longer need to be overly explicit. If anything, having tons of links will confuse your user, and thus you get dinged by Google for a bad user experience

Over optimization is a pretty real thing, but you have to really go out of your way to land in a penalty situation.

Your competitors may be outranking you, not because of optimization, but because of the links they actually have and the authority they have in an industry.

When we provide consulting, one of the things we continue to repeat to clients is "Keep an eye on the competition, but FOCUS on your business." If you spend all your time watching what the competition is doing, you'll often miss the mark in how awesome YOU are and why you're better.

Perform your base optimizations, and then take inventory of what you've done. Run an audit, audit the competition, evaluate and improve again.

 

[rf-harris]

Interlinking is definitely a good thing to do and when you choose the right anchor text with for right pages, it will surely gonna help with your website SEO. But you should not just write content to put links in them, you first write great content and then fit in the keywords in them to link your website pages to one and another.

 

[PeterShene]

Thanks again red 3 click rule obvious to you another thing that i need to have a look at.

I like how you say you want a user to land on a page that may be down the line relating exactly to what they want.

I can really see how this could make conversions alot higher especially if you are covering many topics.

I have for certain search terms found google witll place an internal page above my home page which in those cases im k with because it has alot more to do with the search phrase , whoever it doesnt do that with all pages i have another subject cats for example , i mention cats on my homepage but i also have a detailed page on cats yet google chose to show my homepage for the search..

Is this a case of the content on my homepage is stronger or a combination on the content inbound links and internal linking structure gone wrong ?

 

[bigredseo]

i have another subject cats for example , i mention cats on my homepage but i also have a detailed page on cats yet google chose to show my homepage for the search..

Is this a case of the content on my homepage is stronger or a combination on the content inbound links and internal linking structure gone wrong ?

For the most part, yes. It'll either be content related or link related (not enough links to the page).

There's some other factors Google may look at like I listed above, but I'd lean toward the content not being enough quality for Google to rank the page.

 

[PeterShene]

Hey thanks for all the effort in answering questions. I have since we started this just tried a logical approach in linking what would be useful to users and not what im trying to rank.

On my google analytics my user metrics have increased quite a bit more time spend on pages and less page views, my bouncerate also decline down to 40 for organic searches.

I have seen a improval in ranking on the serps in most of my queries im guessing this is result of the user metrics more than anything else.

I know google has a ton of different other factors in play so im sure.

But heck il chalk it up to user metrics for now.

 

[Artashes]

@PeterShene, hard work pays off! Congrats on improving your metrics.

 

[arihantwebtech]

I will like to tell if you have various pages which related to same category you can put brief content on home page create content based internal link.

 

[arihantwebtech]

Bigredseo explained it very well and in detailed, very helpful. One more point I will add is, make sure there should not be more than 100 internal links per page.

Can we count header and footer links in this total. Because if we have 10k pages of website it will be very difficult to maintain this ratio. Please check once what you have mention your post.

 

[bigredseo]

I will like to tell if you have various pages which related to same category you can put brief content on home page create content based internal link.

Yes, definitely. Any time there's a place where content belongs so that your users can find it, then you should put it there. There are no issues with linking internal content, and in fact, if it's your cornerstone content (the main focus or featured service/product), then it's advised to put the content on the page and cross-link it.

 

[bigredseo]

Can we count header and footer links in this total. Because if we have 10k pages of website it will be very difficult to maintain this ratio. Please check once what you have mention your post.

If you have 10,000 pages on your site, you better not be linking to every one of them from a single page!

Yes, count your headers/footers in those links. While Google doesn't pay much attention to these links right now, your users do.

Giving them 15 links in a drop-down, with 5 dropdowns, that's 75 paths to choose. At that point, you've already confused your visitor.

As for a site with 10,000 pages - there are very few sites that legitimately have 10,000 pages of QUALITY content. There may be thousands of blog posts that were spun content, but that's not really helping anyone.

If you're referring to 10,000 pages to be on the same line as 10,000 products - then yes, I can see that many products in a store (the largest store we did SEO for had over 1 million products) - but again, not every page links to every page. There's no reason for Toasters to link to Mouse Pads or other weird connections!