While external backlinks receive much attention in SEO, internal linking is still a missed opportunity. As Google Search Advocate John Mueller emphasizes, "internal linking is one of the most important, basic things you can do for SEO."
By strategically putting internal links, we can improve the crawlability, indexability and rankings of our TOP pages, enhance the understanding of our page content through targeted anchor text strategies, and prevent pages from becoming orphaned. to ensure that your site's internal linking strategy is optimized for the best possible performance, a comprehensive Technical SEO Audit is essential.
To gain a fresh perspective on your site's internal linking structure and pinpoint areas for enhancement, consider conducting a comprehensive analysis using Screaming Frog (SF) combined with Chat GPT. This approach can uncover valuable insights into how effectively your content is interlinked. Below are initial steps to analyze your internal linking structure from a different angle.
How To Analyse Your Internal Linking with Screaming Frog & GPT-4
- In GPT-4 activate the Data Interpreter Plugin, which will assist in analyzing complex data sets.
- Use a Screaming Frog (SF) tool or any similar crawler to perform a comprehensive crawl of your website. This step is crucial for gathering extensive data on your site's current internal linking setup.
- Once the crawl is complete, download the bulk export of all inlinks. This data will include every internal link found on your site, showing which pages are linking to each other.
- With the export data ready, upload the Excel sheet to the chat interface with GPT-4. Ensure the Data Interpreter Plugin is active to analyze the data effectively.
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Diving Deeper into Internal Link Analysis
Having gathered your site's internal linking data with crawler and prepared it for analysis with GPT-4, you're now ready to dive deeper. The following steps will guide you through interpreting the data to enhance your site's SEO interlinking strategy. This analysis will help identify which pages are pivotal in your site's structure, spotlight orphan pages, and refine your use of anchor text/alt text for better page authority distribution.
To continue with the analysis of your site's internal linking, follow these Prompts after activating the Data Interpreter Plugin in Chat GPT:
1. Familiarise yourself with the different columns in the report. It's essential to grasp the purpose of each column. Provide the total number of rows with data and the count of links in the "Link Position" column labelled as "Content".
Explanation: the first step is to ensure the crawler report data matches what you see in your Excel sheet. This is to check that all the internal linking data you need has loaded correctly and is accurate, so you don't make decisions based on incorrect information.
2. Analyze all rows and columns with data. Design a relationship chart illustrating the correlation between the Anchor Text and its frequency of appearance as Anchor Text for an internal link.
Explanation: the second step taken aim to explore how often certain Anchors are used within a site. By doing this, we can see which terms are most common and if there's a need to diversify our link text to improve SEO and site navigation.
3.Analyze all rows and columns with data. Design a relationship chart illustrating the correlation between the Anchor Text and its frequency of appearance as Anchor Text for an internal link. For this task, only consider instances where the Link Path contains /p[
Explanation: in the previous step of our analysis, we took a broad look at all anchor texts to get a general picture of the internal linking practices across the entire website. This encompassed every instance of internal links, including those within repetitive sections such as headers and footers, which often do not change from page to page and may not directly contribute to the site's internal linking strategy. Now, let’s zoom in on what really matters on our site by looking at the links in the paragraphs, which you can spot by seeing "/p[" in their paths. We should pay extra attention to these because they are nestled in the heart of our writing, where we have the chance to use a variety of different anchor texts. By using different words and phrases for these links, we can give a better idea of what the linked pages are about. This makes it easier for readers and search engines to understand the context and content of the pages we’re linking to.
If you want to dive deeper into why it's so beneficial to use a variety of anchor texts in your internal links, you should definitely check out the webinar by Cyrus Shepard from Zyppy who's talking about "Why Your Internal Links Aren’t Actually Optimized."
4. Design a relationship chart illustrating the correlation between the Alt Text and its frequency of appearance as Alt Text for an internal link. Annotate each bar with the exact number of occurrences for each Alt Text
Explanation: the chart above visualizes the top Alt Texts and their frequencies of appearance as Alt Text for internal links, Each bar provides a clear view of the most commonly used Alt Texts within website's internal linking structure. For instance, e-commerce websites use lots of images as shortcuts to their products and sections. It's really useful for these sites to check and improve Alt Text that go with these images.
For instance, let's say the Alt Text for a website's logo is just "logo" and this same text appears on every page. This isn't very helpful. A better approach would be to use the website's name as the Alt Text for the logo. This small change makes it clearer to search engines that this image is your Brand Identity.
Wrapping Up
In wrapping up, the prompts we've explored are just a few examples of the many ways you can analyze your website's internal links. Let your creativity guide you to other areas that could benefit from a deep dive. For instance, you might want to map out and visualize the pathways your links create to better understand the layout of your site and how users navigate through it. These insights could reveal new opportunities to streamline your site's navigation or to highlight under-emphasized pages.
It's crucial, though, to remember that any analysis is only as good as the data it's based on. Always take the time to verify that your data is complete and accurate, don't rely on automated tools alone. A manual spot-check of a few links can save you from the pitfalls of incorrect data that could lead to misguided strategies.
I hope these insights inspire you to look at your site's internal linking from a new perspective and to experiment with the data available to you. And as you embark on this analytical journey, share your experiences and discoveries! Did you find a new method that worked wonders for your site? Or maybe you have questions about the process? Leave a comment below and let's discuss the strategies that have transformed your approach to SEO and what remarkable results you've achieved. Dive in, analyze, and join the conversation!
