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Wanted: Link wranglers - Taming your website's wild herd

Josep M
September 15, 2023

Wanted: Link wranglers - Taming your website's wild herd

Here's the deck from my last talk at BrightonSEO Sept 2023.

In it a share a method to extract all the internal links for a specific area of the website, usually the blog. Here, I share with you how I do this using Screaming Frog and then export all the information into Looker Studio, to give a detailed view of all internal links (with anchor texts and URLs). You will learn how to extract all the internal links on your website, analyse them and optimise them to improve traffic and rankings.

Feel free to contact me for any doubt :-)

Hope you find it helpful!

Josep M Felip

Josep M

September 15, 2023
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Transcript

  1. Wanted: Link
    Wranglers Taming
    your site's wild herd
    Josep M Felip

    Learning Technologies Group PLC
    Speakerdeck.com/jmfelip
    @jmfelip

    View Slide

  2. #BrightonSEO
    SEOs
    Internal links
    Howdy Partners?Tired of seeing your internal links running
    wild across your website like unbroken stallions?


    Grab your spurs, saddle up and let’s lasso them into an
    optimised herd. And let’s get your website galloping ahead
    of your competition

    View Slide

  3. Why are internal links important?
    #BrightonSEO

    View Slide

  4. internal links make bots happy
    #BrightonSEO
    That’s what they were created for! So let’s give
    them links to discover and let’s pray to Google
    almighty for all of them to be indexed!

    View Slide

  5. Better User experience
    #BrightonSEO
    Internal links guide
    our users to the most
    important pages where
    they will discover
    more content, spend
    more time, reduce
    bounce rate, and
    hopefully…

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  6. and hopefully


    convert
    #BrightonSEO

    View Slide

  7. Logical information structure
    #BrightonSEO
    Internal links help us
    create a logical
    information structure, for
    SE quickly discover and
    understand what the site
    is about. By categorising
    content we create topical
    authority and we tell
    Google our site is
    relevant to users and
    worth ranking


    View Slide

  8. Relevancy
    #BrightonSEO
    Internal links help us
    to get more
    relevancy. We can
    influence the
    relevancy of certain
    kwds with the anchor
    text and associate
    specific kwds to that
    page to improve
    rankings


    View Slide

  9. Which links do we want?
    #BrightonSEO
    All those links that
    can be more relevant
    to influence the
    destination page. Those
    links surrounded by a
    good semantic field,
    from a page that
    attracts good amount
    of traffic.

    View Slide

  10. How do we get them?
    #BrightonSEO
    Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to

    The Magnificent Three!

    View Slide

  11. + +
    The magnificent three
    #BrightonSEO

    View Slide

  12. Config - Custom > Link Positions
    #BrightonSEO
    Open Screaming Frog,
    go to the Crawl
    config menu, Custom,
    then Custom link
    positions

    View Slide

  13. JM Felip -SEO Manager
    Config - Custom > Link Positions
    #BrightonSEO
    Here are the
    Semantic HTML tags
    where SF is going to
    look for links.


    Awesome, isn’t it?

    View Slide

  14. #BrightonSEO
    Well, not so fast cowboy!

    There’s more than meet
    the eye here…


    View Slide

  15. < header >
    < nav >
    < aside
    < section
    < section
    < footer >
    < main
    Semantic html
    #BrightonSEO
    We actually want to
    get the links within
    the tag
    (associated to a
    class). Why?

    Because there are the
    links with more
    potential to influence
    destinationg pages,
    surrounded with a
    good semantic field.


    View Slide

  16. JM Felip -SEO Manager
    Link Positions
    #BrightonSEO
    We tell SF to get
    the links within
    our selected class
    for the
    tag. In this case
    “post_content”.

    1. Click Add


    2. Move it up just
    below
    1
    2

    View Slide

  17. JM Felip -SEO Manager
    getting blog class
    #BrightonSEO
    But how do we
    get that class?


    Easy! From a
    previous regular
    crawl.


    Select a URL


    View Slide

  18. getting blog class
    #BrightonSEO
    Go to the
    INLINKS tab and
    look for the
    Link Path colum.


    There you’ll see
    the class for
    that link from
    the Content
    position


    View Slide

  19. getting blog class
    #BrightonSEO
    Here’s a bit larger. In this case we
    only need what’s inside the quotes.

    But what happens if we don’t have a
    class?


    Well, then we can use the ID


    View Slide

  20. getting id/xpath
    #BrightonSEO
    If there’s no class, it’s likely that the
    main area has an ID. You just get this
    path, the DIV where the ID is, and
    chuck it into your custom link position


    View Slide

  21. Link Position xpath
    #BrightonSEO
    Like this.


    Simple as pie!


    View Slide

  22. JM Felip -SEO Manager
    Export links to gsheet
    #BrightonSEO
    Once we’ve run
    our crawl it’s
    time to export
    our links to the
    spreadsheet, our
    warehouse.

    We’ll select all
    the URLs from
    the crawl

    View Slide

  23. JM Felip -SEO Manager
    Export links to gsheet
    #BrightonSEO
    Then, from the
    lower part, we
    go to the INLINKS
    tab and select
    EXPORT.

    This will create
    a CSV file that
    we’ll export to
    our Google Drive

    View Slide

  24. JM Felip -SEO Manager
    Clean up your sheet
    #BrightonSEO
    x
    x
    Now that we
    have our data in
    the spreadhseet,
    it’s time to clean
    it up. Make sure
    you exclude all
    non-wanted links,
    like these ones
    from the Sitemap

    View Slide

  25. Taming links with looker studio
    #BrightonSEO
    From the template I’m gonna share with you, we connect our
    spreadsheet to Looker Studio. There are 3 sections, broken down here.

    This is the first one where you select the URL you want to focus on.
    There are some handy filters (URL & Anchor).

    You can see where all the links come from in the score cards.

    View Slide

  26. Taming links with looker studio
    #BrightonSEO
    The second area is
    where we have all
    the data for the
    focus URL: where
    the links come
    from, anchor text,
    the link position
    and the number of
    links

    View Slide

  27. Taming links with looker studio
    #BrightonSEO
    The 3rd area, at
    the bottom, is where
    you can see the
    stats: where the
    links come from and
    the % of them over
    the total.


    To the right, you
    see anchor texts
    used and % over
    total

    View Slide

  28. Taming links with looker studio
    #BrightonSEO
    In detail: we select the URL that we want to focus on.
    Then you’ll see how all the data changes

    View Slide

  29. Taming links with looker studio
    #BrightonSEO
    Here we can see how all the data has changed and where
    the links are coming from for that particular URL.

    View Slide

  30. Taming links with looker studio
    #BrightonSEO
    Here you can see we’ve applied the filter and we can
    only see the links coming from the blog

    View Slide

  31. Taming links with looker studio
    #BrightonSEO
    And finally, here we can see the stats. Quite important:
    how many anchor texts are we using to link to the
    destination page. This is where you get creative folks!

    View Slide

  32. Results
    #BrightonSEO
    If we’ve done
    our job well,
    here’re the
    results after
    taming your
    links and work
    them out!

    A bit more
    than 20
    positions up in
    only 15 days!

    View Slide

  33. Results
    #BrightonSEO
    And here a
    jump of around
    30 to 60
    positions up! In
    only 15 days!

    View Slide

  34. Look for a unique class.


    If not possible, create
    your own or get the
    xPath

    #BrightonSEO
    Takeaway

    View Slide

  35. Rename your new Links
    position.


    Place it always after
    the Head
    Takeaway
    #BrightonSEO

    View Slide

  36. Connect to Looker
    Studio using the
    template
    Takeaway
    #BrightonSEO

    View Slide

  37. Looker Studio template
    https://lookerstudio.google.com/s/
    i9CGmeS4wVM
    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/
    1SuPCpEwpYWT9zx3trgqV3LT6lNJFQUjx
    RCXPZPxRGnw/edit?usp=drive_link
    spreadsheet
    #BrightonSEO

    View Slide

  38. Thank y’all!
    #BrightonSEO
    @jmfelip
    linkedin.com/in/jmfelip/

    View Slide