Internal linking optimisation to boost your SEO traffic

10th January 2013Annabelle

Hello Botify community!

Team at Botify wishes you all the best for 2013.

SEO and linking are two words that are inseparable and today we will be looking at this very closely using data from Botify.

This post is an opportunity to show you how we analyse the internal linking and its direct consequencies on SEO visits. We will see that optimising the distribution of your internal linking is a huge lever in terms of improving your SEO performance.

Let us take the site that we have been following for several weeks now as an example

To recall, the number of pages present in the structure of the site was as follows: (broken down by dimension / Homepage, Warning and Accumulated others were deliberately set aside for this post):

We are therefore going to take a look at the distribution of internal linking within these categories. 

The Botify crawler calculates the distribution of your linking within each of your dimensions

As you were able to discover in previous posts, the Botify crawler retrieves all the SEO characterisitcs of each of the pages discovered in your structure. Botify calculates the total number of inbound/outbound links by dimension and the distribution of this internal linking within a category.

Botify therefore shows the average number of inbound links for each dimension:

It is noteworthy that the the internal linking is not equitably distributed according to the dimensions. Some dimensions such as “Top Brands” or “New Business” receive more links than others. At this stage, this distribution is mainly the result of the construction site and of different manual SEO optimisations.

Now we are going to see if internal linking impacts on the activity of pages.

The dimensions which receive the most internal links are those which have the most page activity

As a reminder, a page is active from the moment it has generated at least one SEO visit in the period of logs analysed (30 days in this case).
The following graphic illustrates the rate of active pages by dimension (the number of active pages divided by the number of pages crawled by Google) .

A conclusion is made evident: the dimensions which receive the most inbound links are very much those which have the most active pages!

To explain furhter: in which dimension does the SEO manager wish to have the highest rate of active pages? Having a very good performance in the dimension “Top Brands” is already excellent, but could the accent be put on the “Products” or “Top Products” pages? These are effectively the dimensions that are made up of the greatest number of pages and without a doubt the pages that deliver the best in terms of turnover.

Optimisation of internal linking can therefore be managed with the objective of improving SEO performance on specific pages. This optimisation will revolve around three objectives:

Р to improve the crawling rate of the most strategic pages (you guide bots towards uncrawled pages to be sure of having a 100% rate of crawl of strategic pages),

– to re-inforce the semantic of pages (you choose the anchors for your links in order to improve the density of key words),

– to diffuse a maximum of Page Rank towards the pages that you’ve selected thanks to data provided by Botify: top or middle tail pages, pages generating strong revenues, pages positioned on the second page of Google results.

Botify also provides the details of the distribution of internal linking within a category and all the data of outbound links per page. You will therefore benefit from all the info necessary to manage your optimisations well.

To conclude: to optimise your internal linking thanks to data provided by Botify, it’s the assurance of internally managing all the stages of optimisation, to not spend on external partners and to concentrate on the structures that will have the fastest results.

Why miss out? Thanks in advance for your comments!