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

Wanted: Link Wranglers Taming your site's wild herd Josep M
Felip   Learning Technologies Group PLC Speakerdeck.com/jmfelip @jmfelip

#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  

Why are internal links important? #BrightonSEO

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!

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…

and hopefully convert #BrightonSEO

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

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

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.  

How do we get them? #BrightonSEO Ladies and Gentlemen, let
me introduce you to   The Magnificent Three!  

+ + The magnificent three #BrightonSEO

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

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?  

#BrightonSEO Well, not so fast cowboy!   There’s more than
meet the eye here…

< header > < nav > < aside < section
< section < footer > < main Semantic html #BrightonSEO We actually want to get the links within the <main> tag (associated to a class). Why?   Because there are the links with more potential to influence destinationg pages, surrounded with a good semantic field.

JM Felip -SEO Manager Link Positions #BrightonSEO We tell SF
to get the links within our selected class for the<main> tag. In this case “post_content”.   1. Click Add 2. Move it up just below <head> 1 2

JM Felip -SEO Manager getting blog class #BrightonSEO But how
do we get that class? Easy! From a previous regular crawl. Select a URL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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!

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

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

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

Connect to Looker Studio using the template Takeaway #BrightonSEO

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

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

Wanted: Link wranglers - Taming your website's ...

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

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