How should i best structure my internal links?
-
I am new to SEO and looking to employ a logical but effective internal link strategy.
Any easy ways to keep track of what page links to what page?
I am a little confused regarding anchor text in as much as how I should use this. e.g. for a category page "Towels", I was going to link this to another page we want to build PA for such as "Bath Sheets". What should I put in for anchor text? keep it simple and just put "Bath Sheets" or make it more direct like "Buy Bath Sheets".
Should I also vary anchor text if i have another 10 pages internally linking to this or keep it the same.
Any advise would be really helpful.
Thanks
Craig
-
Hi Alice,
Many thanks for your response, very helpful indeed.
Thanks Again.
Craig
-
Hi Fraser,
I think the best strategy for internal linking is to keep things simple and consider what would give the best user experience for your customers. So, for example, linking from towels to bath sheets is logical and helpful, as it's closely related.
The same applies to anchor text - let the customer know what's on the other end of the link, and don't try to slot in unnatural phrases and keywords for SEO benefit. It's likely that excessive internal anchor text linking triggers a penalty (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/testing-the-value-of-anchor-text-optimized-internal-links), so try to keep anchors natural and vary them if the context requires it. So you might use "bath sheets" on one page, "buy bath sheets" on another, "our range of bath sheets" on another and so on.
In terms of keeping track of links, a site map or a spreadsheet should easily accommodate the information you want to track.
You might also want to consider page rank sculpting, which uses internal links to channel the page rank towards high priority and high value pages. However a well-structured site channels page rank naturally and doesn't require any sculpting. Matt Cutts deals with the practice here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
International Country URL Structure
Hey Guys, We have a www.site.com (gTLD) site, the primary market in Australia. We want to expand to US and UK. For the homepage, we are looking to create 3 new subfolders which are: site.com/au/ site.com/uk/ site.com/us/ Then if someone visits the site.com redirect based on their ip address to to the correct location. We are also looking to setup hreflang tags between the 3 sub-folders and set geo-location targeting in google search console at sub-folder level. Just wondering if this setup sounds ok for international SEO? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pladcarl90 -
Internal Linking - Can You Over Do It?
Hi, One of the sites I'm working on has a forum with thousands of pages, amongst thousands of other pages. These pages produce lots of organic search traffic... 200,000 per month. We're using a bit of custom code to link relevant words and phrases from various discussion threads to hopefully related discussion pages. This generates thousands of links and up to 8 in-context links per page. A page could have anywhere from 200 to 3000 words in one to 50+ comments. Generally, a page with 200 words would have fewer of these automatically generated links, just because there are fewer terms naturally on the page. Is there any possible problem with this, including but not limited to some kind of internal anchor text spam or anything else? We do it to knit together pages for link juice and hopefully user experience... giving them another page to go to. The pages we link to are all our pages that produce or we hope to produce organic search traffic from. Thanks! ....Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Best option for Affiliate links on your website?
Hello! I have a website which is completely affiliate based. What is the best option for the links on-page? Examples would be: affiliate.website.com/12901730?2=3532523=user12342901730?2=3532523=user?Whittie www.website.com/affiliate=user?Whittie=load-of-tracking=date=blah=blaH?blah And So on... Which look ugly as sin when you hover over the Anchor Text. Ideally I would like a 301 redirect to mysite.com/goto/affiliatename, which would then have a rel nofollow. This way I could also track the exit pages via Analytics too guess, which I've not currently got set up and i'm desperate for it to be done. Does this method effect anything on search engines though? I've seen mixed report, but going back to 2011 which is too long ago in the SEO world. Another option is to use the likes of "Bit.ly" or use another domain and host 301s on there? The new bit.ly integration from moz might come in handy here. Please advise on the subject, I really appreciate any help on this, as i'm at a brick wall. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Best linking practice for international domains
SEOMoz team, I am wondering that in the days of Panda and Penguin SEOs have an opinion on how to best link between international domains for a web page property. Let's say you have brandname.DE (German site) brandname.FR (French site) brandname.CO.UK (British site) Right now we are linking form each site on the page to the other two language sites to make users aware of the translated version of the site which obviously make it a site wide link which seems to be lately disencouraged by Google. Did anyone out there have any ideas how to strategically interlink between international domains that represent language versions of a web site? /PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomypro0 -
Measurement of Link Value
Over the past few months I have encountered webmasters who claim to be using instruments far better than open site explorer but they will not disclose what they are. Are there better ways of determining the value of a link than OSE? Is "link juice" more important than page/domain authority where the link resides? Or vice-vesa. Any help understanding this would be appreciated. I do not want to offend other webmasters but I also do not want to be fooled by them either while negotiating a link exchange with them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Best Structure for Multi-Language/International Website
We are getting ready to do a total redsign of our website, which is a multi-language global website (www.hurco.com). Today we use an ip address lookup to determine country of origin and redirect to say hurco.de for Germany. The main reason for this was that our German division was afraid that their potential customers were going to the hurco.com site and seeing product that was not available to them. Is there a better way from an SEO standpoint to structure our website? Should we have all hurco.com traffic goto a country selection page and let them go there manually? Other good practices we should follow? Would you structure the entire site as //www.hurco.com/en-us or /en-canada (language and country) and then have all international domains 301 redirect to the proper one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fassnachtp0 -
Best website structure for product benefits and features.
I'm in disagreement with my partner over how best to represent our products' benefits and features on the homepage of our website. I'm interested in this from primarily a SEO perspective but it obviously has an impact on conversions as well. I believe that a homepage shouldn't contain too much information so as not to overwhelm the user, a brief sentence or two about each benefit with a link to another page with in depth info about the related feature. Each of these inner pages would be optimized and contain much more content that you could put on the homepage example below. Each Please see wireframe A He believes in more information on the homepage. There is more content to index which he believes is important for the homepage. Also, by using tabs most of the content is hidden from initial view so its doesn't clutter the page and the user doesn't have to leave the page to decide whether he is interested in the software. Please see wireframe B below. I'd really love to hear from other Moz'ers which they would choose and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Riona0 -
We are a web hosting company and some of our best links are from our own customers, on the same IP, but different Class C blocks..
We are a web hosting company and some of our best links are from our own customers, on the same IP same IP, but different Class C blocks. How do search engines treat the uniqie scenario of web hosting companies and linking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FirePowered0