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

Transcript

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

   Learning Technologies Group PLC
   Speakerdeck.com/jmfelip
   @jmfelip
   

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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
   

   

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3. Why are internal links important?
   #BrightonSEO
   

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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!
   

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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
   

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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
   
   
   

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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
   
   
   

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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.
   

   

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

    The Magnificent Three!
    

    

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11. + +
    The magnificent three
    #BrightonSEO
    

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

    

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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?
    

    

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14. #BrightonSEO
    Well, not so fast cowboy!
    

    There’s more than meet
    the eye here…
    
    
    

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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.
    
    
    

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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
    

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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
    
    
    

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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
    
    
    

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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
    
    
    

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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
    
    
    

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21. Link Position xpath
    #BrightonSEO
    Like this.
    
    
    Simple as pie!
    
    
    

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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
    

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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
    

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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
    

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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.
    

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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
    

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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
    

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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
    

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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.
    

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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
    

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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!
    

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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!
    

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

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34. Look for a unique class.
    
    
    If not possible, create
    your own or get the
    xPath
    

    #BrightonSEO
    Takeaway
    

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35. Rename your new Links
    position.
    
    
    Place it always after
    the Head
    Takeaway
    #BrightonSEO
    

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

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

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

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