Enhancing internal links can be handy for search engine optimization. The bigger the site, the more that the optimization can assist Google identify essential pages.
Ecommerce websites have category pages, product pages, and duplicates of those pages. A great practice for ecommerce is crafting the Googlebot paths towards the essential pages– the successful ones. For this, search optimizers normally utilize robots.txt, canonical tags, and nofollows. However those methods are more like detours. Direct links are much better.
For example, if I were looking for a pet dog food category page to rank much better, I would value internal links from copy-rich pages that belong to dog food. But if the website is huge, how can we recognize the pages to connect from?
Internal Linking Opportunities
Start with a web crawler. Sitebulb, Shrieking Frog, and DeepCrawl are the 3 I’m most knowledgeable about. For this article, I’ll use Shouting Frog due to its appeal.
Step 1. Determine the pages you wish to point the internal links to. For example, say that Guitar Center, a seller, desires its Nylon Strings classification page to rank higher. (I have no connection to Guitar Center besides as a consumer.) Perhaps nylon strings have good margins, and the company would benefit from more organic-search exposure. Enhancing the internal connecting structure might be an effective signal to Google. However we require to crawl the whole website to take stock of possible pages to connect from.
Open Yelling Frog. Under Configuration > Custom-made > Browse, there’s a “Customized Browse” window. Here you can ask Screaming Frog to highlight any pages that match the term “nylon strings.” Yelling Frog will check out the source code of every page. When it discovers this precise expression in the code, it will log the page under the Custom tab.
After crawling the site, go to Setup > Custom These are pages that discuss “nylon strings” in their code.
Next, set your spider to “Note Mode” at Mode > List This permits you to submit a list of URLs to review.
Before starting this crawl, go back to Configuration > Custom-made > Search, and remove your “nylon strings” search term. This time we desire to scan each page for a link to the Nylon Strings classification. So, paste in the relative URL, which, in this case is / Nylon-Strings. gc
Next, change “Includes” to “Does Not Contain.”