What is your onsite linking strategy?
-
So there are a few different routes to take when you're SEOing your site. My quest is to determine which is the best way to approach this. Let's use a real life example of a product. It's project management software, online collaboration software, employee scheduling tool, business process streamlining tool, client management tool and task/to do manager. It works for virtually any industry. I've created my keyword document and it's HUGE. I've created my wireframe with related keyphrases in buckets. Each one of the example keyphrases listed above have slight variations then a whole list of long tails. I have a few options as I see it:
- Create site sections within the main site that focus on each (This can make the site look slightly sloppy and categories would have to be masked so it doesn't appear spammy)
- Create a page in the blog relevant to each keyphrase and link all subsequent blog posts within that keyphrase family directly to that blog post (This seems like my best option) and have cta's or conversion mechanisms on this page
- Link all keyphrases to the home page (Seems like a terrible idea)
Not sure if I answered my own question here, but I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks. What are your thoughts?
-
I'm not sure the best link structure exist. But i usually use 2 different approach for internal cross-linking.
First one is ease to use and useful for database sites, like shops, directories etc. It's simple tree hierarchy with vertical links: home<>category<>object and horizontal links between related objects and categories.
Second one i use for sites with large amount of content. It's more algorithmic and lead to measurable results in my tests. Here is it:
1. Select keyword and target page for this keyword.
2. Search in google: "keyword" site:mysite.com
3. Google highlight "keyword" in relevant pages text, or part of keyword.
4. what you need is link to target page via this highlighted keywords, or if there are part of keyword - update text to exactly match, or add additional sentence.
Usually i use no more than 10 links with each anchor, and it increase ranking on 1-3 positions. Be carefully - too many links is not good, per link efficiency drop down when target page link from more the 10 pages with same anchor..
-
The idea linking stucture is to have very page linked from the home page and every page link back to the home page and no other links. But this is not user friendly.
What you dont want is to have a site map linking to every page from every page.
This article should explain.
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank
-
I too am wondering on the best link structure, hopefully some experienced folks can chime in. I have a lot of new content I am putting together for my site tradethink.com (please review if you like). I am tossed between placing links to the new content pages directly from the home page or creating a sub folder. One of my competitors places direct links in the footer and has a low DA, but ranks #1 for many of the same terms. I don't want to mess up by placing a sub if it will hurt.
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
-
Sitewide links and owned site
Hi everyone, I need the community opinion on something. I am webmarketer and SEO for a pure player who runs a couple of e-commerce sites. On one side we have bigsite.com. It makes all our revenue. I have been in charge for years. Results are good. We have smallsite.com. It is starting. But small revenues for the moment. We have a new SEO working on this. My question is : We always had a banner on bigsite.com's homepage, sending valuable traffic to smallsite.com.T he new SEO, has footer sitewide links from smallsite.com to bigsite.com homepage. Considering both sites share same ssl, server and company name, I am quite sure this is out of google's guide lines and would hurt bigsite.com. Do you agree that this is wrong from the new SEO, and that it could hurt my work and the search results for bigsite.com and smallsite.com, as well as team work ? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kepass0 -
Link Spring Clean
Hey, Based on the most up to date thinking - what's the best way to approach a link spring clean? We've got a site with a large amount of links (a few of which look a bit spammy - SEO directories etc) Also, the brand changed it's name and URL a while back so there are directory/web citations using the old URL and sometimes the old name. The old URL is 301'd but I'm thinking (especially in terms of local SEO) these citations with differnt business names/numbers/web addresses could be particularly harmful? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia1 -
Links from cloud-based software
Hello fellow Mozzers! We've recently rewritten the content for a cloud-based project management tool, they then asked about what they could do to rank higher. As well as suggesting the usual content creation methods to help build links (which it looks like they'll need a LOT of - the field is either made up of terms that have no searches, or are extremely competitive), I wondered if there was any way of harnessing the fact they provide a cloud-based SaaS - a 'Powered by...' notice or somesuch? The only thing is they provide a project budget management tool, so I'm guessing the site itself wouldn't actually be coming into contact with the tool? Does anyone have any experience / advice working on a similar scenario where you've managed to leverage the tool for links where it's cloud-based? Thanks in advance for any help! Nick.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | themegroup0 -
Disavow Links Notification
No manual actions on our sites, just Penguin related. I put in a disavow for one site in October and Webmaster Tools kept a message up for some time saying the disavow links file for that site had been updated. I put in a disavow for another site of ours last week and I've had no such message. I checked and the file is there. Was this an intentional change on Google's part? Just want to make sure something's not messed up here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
For those of you that used LINK DETOX.
Did you go ahead and remove all the TOXIC and HIGH RISK links? Just the toxic? Were you successful with the tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
Clickable links in Google SERP
Hi, I came across clickable links appearing below the meta description in Google SERP. The links are not necessarily the top pages for that particular domain and sometimes tend to reflect the newly added stock. Is there a way to determine what factors account for this? Thanks, mryxN.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RaksG0 -
Excessive navigation links
I'm working on the code for a collaborative project that will eventually have hundreds of pages. The editor of this project wants all pages to be listed in the main navigation at the top of the site. There are four main dropdown (suckerfish-style) menus and these have nested sub- and sub-sub-menus. Putting aside the UI issues this creates, I'm concerned about how Google will find our content on the page. Right now, we now have over 120 links above the main content of the page and have plans to add more as time goes on (as new pages are created). Perhaps of note, these navigation elements are within an html5 <nav>element: <nav id="access" role="navigation"> Do you think that Google is savvy enough to overlook the "abundant" navigation links and focus on the content of the page below? Will the <nav>element help us get away with this navigation strategy? Or should I reel some of these navigation pages into categories? As you might surmise the site has a fairly flat structure, hence the lack of category pages.</nav> </nav> </nav>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | boxcarpress1 -
Too many links!
Hi, I'm running a wordpress blog (modhop.com) and am getting the "too many links" on almost all of my pages. It appears that in addition to basic site navigation I have plug-ins that create invisible links that are counted in the crawl...at least that's my guess. Is there a good way to control this in wordpress? A nofollow in the .htaccess? A plug-in that does this? (I'm sort of at novice-plus level here so the simplest solution is ideal.) Thanks! Jake modhop.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modhop0