EDITS.WS

Author: Meike Hendriks

  • How to use Google Search Console: a beginner’s guide

    Do you have a website or maintain the website of the company you work for? Of course, to do this right, you need to keep a keen eye on the performance of your website. Google offers several tools to collect and analyze data from your website. You probably have heard of Google Analytics and Google Search Console before. These tools are free for everyone maintaining a website and can give you valuable insights about your website. Here we’ll explain how to use Google Search Console for SEO!

    Table of contents

    Why everyone should use Google Search Console

    Google Search Console helps you track the performance of your website easily. You can get valuable insights from your Google Search Console account, which means you can see what part of your website needs work. This can be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawl errors that need to be fixed. This can also give a specific keyword more attention because the rankings or impressions are decreasing.

    Besides seeing this kind of data, you’ll get email notifications when Google Search Console notices new errors. Because of these notifications, you’re quickly aware of issues you need to fix. That’s why everyone with a website should learn how to use it!

    Search Console is structured around various sections

    Search Console has several sections, which keep expanding as Google adds more:

    • URL Inspection
      • The URL Inspection tool lets you get insights on specific URLs and how Google sees and indexes these. You’ll also see if the page is eligible for rich results.
    • Performance
      • In the Performance section, you’ll discover how your site is doing in the regular search results, on Discover, and on Google News, if your site is eligible for that.
    • Indexing
      • In the Indexing section, you’ll find all the insights you need to see how Google discovers and indexes your pages.
    • Experience
      • The Experience section gives you an idea of how Google values the performance of your page in the form of Page Experience, Core Web Vitals, and mobile usability.
    • Shopping
      • In the Shopping tab, you’ll find more information about how Google sees your products — if you own an ecommerce site or sell something else online.
    • Enhancements
      • The Enhancements section lists all the structured data that Google found on your site and whether or not these are eligible for rich results.
    • Security & Manual Actions
      • The Security & Manual Actions shouldn’t be a much-visited destination as this lists security issues found by Google or when it issues a manual action against your site.
    • Links
      • The Links section overviews your site’s internal and external links.

    Setting up an account

    You’ll need to create an account to start using Google Search Console. Within Google Search Console, you can click on ‘add a new property’ in the top bar:

    adding a new site property to google search console
    Add a new property to get started

    You can insert the website you want to add by clicking on the ‘Add property’ button. If you choose the new Domain option, you only need to add the domain name without www or subdomains. This option tracks everything connected to that domain. With the ‘old’ URL prefix option, you have to add the correct URL, so with ‘HTTPS’ if you have an HTTPS website and with or without ‘www’. To collect the correct data, it’s essential to add the correct version:

    Choose domain if your want to track all your URLs or URL prefix if you want to track specific URLs

    You must verify that you’re the owner when you’ve added a website. There are several options to verify your ownership. The Domain option only works with DNS verification, while the URL prefix supports different methods. You can learn more about the differences in Google’s documentation: adding a new property and verifying your site ownership. You can also use Google’s Site Kit WordPress plugin to connect Analytics and Search Console while giving you statistics in your site dashboard.

    Add to Yoast SEO

    For WordPress users who use Yoast SEO, get the verification code via the ‘HTML tag’ method from the Ownership settings in Search Console. Copy the long, random string of characters.

    See your verification methods in the Google Search Console ownership settings

    You can easily copy this code and paste it into the ‘Webmaster tools’ tab within the Yoast SEO plugin:

    Paste your code into the Google field to finish the process

    After saving this, you can return to Google Search Console and click on the ‘Verify’ button to confirm. If everything is ok, you’ll get a success message, and GSC will start collecting data for your website.

    Features in Google Search Console

    Now you’ve set up your account, what would be the next step? Well, it’s time to look at some of your data! We’ll explore some of the reports and information available in the rest of this article.

    Performance tab

    In the Performance tab, you can see what pages and keywords your website ranks for in Google. You’ll also find reports on your content’s performance in Google Discover and on Google News if you’re eligible for that. It wasn’t that long ago that you could only see the data as far back as 90 days, but today, it’s possible to see the data for up to 16 months.

    If you check the performance tab regularly, you can quickly see what keywords or pages need more attention and optimization. So, where to begin? Within the performance tab, you see a list of ‘queries’, ‘pages’, ‘countries’, or ‘devices’. With ‘search appearance,’ you can check how your rich results are doing in search. You can sort each section by the number of ‘clicks’, ‘impressions’, ‘average CTR’, or ‘average position’. We’ll explain each of them below:

    The Performance overview harbors a ton of information

    1. Clicks

    The number of clicks tells you how often people clicked on your website in Google’s search results. This number can say something about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions: if just a few people click on your result, your result might not stand out in the search results. It can be helpful to check what other results are displayed around you to see how you can optimize your snippet.

    The position of the search result also impacts the number of clicks. If your page is in the top three of Google’s first result page, it will automatically get more clicks than a page that ranks on the second page of the search results.

    2. Impressions

    The impressions tell you how often your website or a specific page is shown in the search results. The number of impressions after this keyword shows how often our website is shown for that keyword in Google’s search results. You don’t know yet what page ranks for that keyword.

    To see what pages might rank for the specific keyword, you can click on the line of the keyword. Doing this for a keyword, the keyword is added as a filter:

    You can query the data in many ways

    Afterward, you can navigate to the ‘Pages’ tab to see what pages rank for this keyword. Are those pages the ones you’d want to rank for that keyword? If not, you might need to optimize the page you’d like to rank. Think of writing better content containing the keyword on that page, adding internal links from relevant pages or posts to the page, making the page load faster, etc.

    3. Average CTR

    The CTR – Click-through rate – tells you what percentage of the people that have seen your website in the search results also clicked through to your website. You probably understand that higher rankings mostly also lead to higher click-through rates.

    However, there are also things you can do yourself to increase the CTR. For example, you could rewrite your meta description and page title to make it more appealing. When the title and description of your site stand out from the other results, more people will probably click on your result, and your CTR will increase. Remember that this will not significantly impact you if you’re not ranking on the first page yet. You might need to try other things first to improve your ranking.

    4. Average position

    The last one on this list is the ‘Average position’. This tells you the average ranking of a specific keyword or page in the time period you’ve selected. Of course, this position isn’t always reliable since more and more people seem to get different search results. Google seems to understand better and better which results fit best for which visitor. However, this indicator still shows whether the clicks, impressions, and average CTR are explainable.

    Indexing

    The’ Indexing’ section is a more technical but treasured addition to Google Search Console. This section shows how many pages are in the index of Google since the last update, how many pages aren’t, and what errors and warnings caused difficulties for Google indexing your pages correctly. Google split this section into parts collecting your regular pages and video pages while giving a home for your XML sitemap and the removals sections.

    You can see how Google indexes your content over time

    We recommend you check this tab regularly to see what errors and warnings appear on your website. However, you also get notifications when Google has found new errors. Please check the error in more detail when you get such a notification.

    You may find that errors are caused when, e.g., a redirect doesn’t seem to work correctly or Google finds broken code or error pages in your theme. Google has a long list of possible reasons why pages aren’t indexed and what you can do to fix that.

    Clicking on one of the issues, you can analyze the error more in-depth to see what specific URLs are affected. When you’ve fixed the error, you can mark it as fixed to make sure Google will test the URL again:

    Fixed the specific error? Validate it so Google can check if it’s gone for real

    Things to look out for

    There are a few things you should always look for when checking out your indexing coverage reports:

    • If you’re writing new content, your indexed pages should steadily increase. This tells you two things: Google can index your site, and you keep your site ‘alive’ by adding content.
    • Watch out for sudden drops! This might mean that Google is having trouble accessing (all of) your website. Something may be blocking Google; whether it’s robots.txt changes or a server that’s down: you need to look into it!
    • Sudden (and unexpected) spikes in the graph might mean an issue with duplicate content (such as both www and non-www, wrong canonicals, etc.), automatically generated pages, or even hacks.

    We recommend you monitor these situations closely and resolve errors quickly, as too many errors could signal low quality (poor maintenance) to Google.

    URL Inspection

    The URL Inspection tool helps you analyze specific URLs. You retrieve the page from Google’s index and compare it with the page as it lives now on your site to see if there are differences. You can also find more technical info on this page, like when and how Google crawled it and how it looked at that moment. Sometimes, you’ll also notice several errors. This might be regarding Google’s inability to crawl your page correctly. It also gives information about the structured data found on this URL.

    The URL Inspection tool gives insights into every URL on your site

    Experience

    The experience report is an invaluable addition. This report gives a good idea of how fast your site loads on mobile and desktop and how Google grades its page experience and core web vitals. In addition, it also shows which pages have issues that keep them from performing well. The data is based on the Chrome UX report, so it’s accurate data from real users.

    Site speed, page experience, and user experience are complex topics containing many moving parts, so it’s good to learn how to think about page speed. You can find the answer here: how to check site speed.

    Find out which pages offer a bad experience and how you can fix that

    Mobile usability

    The mobile usability tab in the Experience section shows you usability issues with your website or specific mobile pages. Since mobile traffic is rising worldwide, we recommend checking this regularly. If your mobile site isn’t user-friendly, many visitors will leave it quickly.

    See if you need to improve your mobile pages

    Enhancements: rich results

    If you have structured data on your site — provided by Yoast SEO, for instance — it’s a good idea to check out the Enhancements reports in Search Console. The Enhancements tab collects all the insights and improvements that could lead to rich results. It lists all the structured data that Google found on your site. There’s an ever-expanding list of rich results, and you can find the following, among other things:

    • breadcrumbs
    • events
    • faqs
    • how-tos
    • jobs
    • logos
    • products
    • reviews
    • sitelinks searchboxes
    • videos

    All these tabs show how many valid enhancements you have or how many have errors or warnings. You get details about the kind of errors and warnings and on which URLs these are found. There’s also a trend line that shows if the number of issues is increasing or decreasing. And that’s just the start of it.

    Here’s an example of a job posting enhancement. You can overlay Impressions to get more context for the stats

    The Enhancements reports help you find and fix issues that hinder the performance of your rich results in search. By checking the issues, reading the support documentation, and validating fixes, you can increase your chance of getting rich results in search. We have a more expansive guide on the structured data Enhancement reports in Google Search Console.

    Sitemaps

    An XML sitemap is a roadmap to all important pages and posts on your website. Every website would benefit from having one. Do you run the Yoast SEO plugin on your website? Then you automatically have an XML sitemap. If not, we recommend creating one to ensure Google can easily find your most important pages and posts.

    You can find an option for XML sitemaps within the Indexing tab of Google Search Console. Here, you can tell Google where your XML sitemap is located on your site:

    Don’t forget to check your XML sitemap

    We recommend everyone enter the URL of their XML sitemap into GSC to make Google find it easily. In addition, you can quickly see if your sitemap gives errors or if some pages aren’t indexed, for instance. Checking this regularly, you’re sure Google can find and read your XML sitemap correctly.

    We recommend regularly checking the XML sitemap section in our plugin to manage which post types or taxonomies you include in your sitemaps!

    Shopping

    A recent addition is the Shopping section. Here, you can check how Google sees your products and if they get proper rich results. You’ll see if they are valid or if they are missing fields that make the product snippets more prominent. Click on a product to see which fields are missing for particular products and if these are essential parts or nice-to-haves. If you’ve added these to the structured data of your products, you validate the fix in Search Console.

    In the Shopping section, you’ll also find your Google Merchant listings and an option to enable shopping tab listings to show your products on the Shopping tab in Google Search. With these options, Google gives ecommerce site owners — and people selling stuff — more ways of checking how their listings are doing.

    Optimize your product listings in Google search

    Within the links to your site section, you can see how many links from other sites are pointing to your website. Besides, you can see what websites link, how many links those websites contain, and what anchor texts are used most in linking to your website. This can be valuable information because links still are vital for SEO.

    Find out which pages receive lots of links

    Within the internal links section, you can check what pages of your website are most linked from other spots on your site. This list can be valuable to analyze regularly because you want your most important pages and posts to get the most internal links. By doing this, you make sure Google understands as well what your cornerstones are.

    You can even see how many links individual pages get

    Manual Actions

    You don’t want to see anything in the manual actions tab. You’ll get more information if your site is penalized by Google. If your site is affected by a manual action, you’ll also get messaged via email.

    Several scenarios can lead to these kinds of penalties, including:

    • You have unnatural/bought links
      Ensure links from and to your site are valuable, not just for SEO. Preferably your links come from and link to related content that is valuable for your readers.
    • Your site has been hacked
      A message stating your site’s probably hacked by a third party. Google might label your site as compromised or lower your rankings.
    • You’re hiding something from Google
      If you’re ‘cloaking’ (that is, intentionally showing different content to users to deceive them), or using ‘sneaky’ redirects (e.g., hiding affiliate URLs), then you’re violating Google’s guidelines (now known as Google Search Essentials).
    • Plain Spam
      Automatically generated content, scraped content, and aggressive cloaking could cause Google to blocklist your site.
    • Spammy structured markup
      If you use rich snippets for too many irrelevant elements on a page or mark up content hidden from the visitor, that might be considered spammy. Mark up what’s necessary and only necessary things.

    Security issues

    Within the security issues tab, you’ll get a notification when your website seems to have a security issue.

    Search Console: an incredibly helpful tool

    Reading this post should give you a good idea of what Search Console is capable of and how to use it, so I’d like to ask you this: Do you already use Google Search Console for your website? If not, create an account to collect data about your website. Do you think something is missing? Feel free to leave a comment!

    Read more: How to make your site stand out in the search results »

    The post How to use Google Search Console: a beginner’s guide appeared first on Yoast.

  • Internal linking for SEO: Why and how?

    Before your content can rank, it needs links. Google finds your posts and pages best when linked to from somewhere on the web. Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish a hierarchy on your site, allowing you to provide the most important pages and posts with more link value than other, less valuable pages. So using the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO! In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of internal linking, how to approach it, and how Yoast SEO can help you with internal linking.

    Did you get a red bullet for internal links in Yoast SEO? Jump straight ahead and read how this assessment works in Yoast SEO and how to improve your internal linking.

    Table of contents

    An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website. Your users and search engines use links to find content on your website. Your users use links to navigate through your site and to find the content they want to find. Search engines also use links to navigate your site. They won’t see a page if there are no links to it.

    There are several types of internal links. In addition to links on your homepage, menu, post feed, etc., you can also add links within your content. We call those contextual links. Contextual links point your users to interesting and related content. Moreover, they allow search engines to determine what content on your site is related and its value. The more links a significant page receives, the more important it will seem to search engines. Therefore, good internal links are crucial to your SEO.

    Every website — even online stores — consists of internal and external links. Internal links connect pages and posts on your website, and external links connect your pages to other websites. This post focuses on internal links and what they mean for SEO. See our posts on link building if you want to get more external links pointing to your site.

    Internal linking is an essential factor for Google and other search engines. But why? Google follows links to discover content on websites and to rank this content in the search results. If a post or page gets many links, this signals to Google that it’s an essential or high-value article. This counts for internal as well as external links.

    Internal linking is something you control as a site owner. You’ll guide visitors and Google to your most important pages with the correct internal links. Our internal linking tool (not available yet in Yoast SEO for Shopify) can help you suggest related posts to link to!

    Internal links establish relationships between content

    Google crawls websites by following internal and external links using a bot called Googlebot. This bot arrives at the website’s homepage, renders the page, and follows the first link. By following the links, Google can work out the relationship between the various pages, posts, and other content. This way, Google finds out which pages on your site cover a similar subject matter.

    For example, this post will have links to the ‘Content SEO’, ‘Internal linking’, and ‘Site structure’ tags. We make sure Google understands that the content on those pages is related to the content of this post by adding these links.

    Internal links help search engines better find your content

    As websites grow in size and complexity, orphaned content becomes an issue for many. Orphaned content refers to pages on your website that have no internal links pointing to them. This issue is because search engines can’t find and index them without any internal link to lead the Googlebot to these pages.

    Even though websites nowadays have sitemaps that list the URL of — most — pages on your site, search engines may take a long time to reach these pages eventually. This is especially true for very big websites that take a lot of resources to crawl or newly created sites that don’t get visited often by Google. Adding internal links to your newly published pages provides search engines with more ways to reach those content.

    In addition to understanding the relationship between content, Google divides link value between all links on a web page. Often, the homepage of a website has the most significant link value because it has the most backlinks. That link value will be shared between all the links on that homepage. The link value passed to the following page will be divided between the links on that page and so on.

    Therefore, your newest blog posts will get more link value if you link to them from the homepage instead of only on the category page. And Google will find recent posts quicker if they’re linked to from the homepage.

    When you understand that links pass their link value on, you’ll understand that more links to a post mean more value. That’s because Google deems a page with lots of valuable links more important; you’ll increase the chance of that page ranking. 

    Setting up an internal linking strategy

    It’s crucial for your SEO to evaluate and improve your internal linking strategy regularly. It’s one of the ways to improve the fitness of your website. By adding the right internal links, you make sure Google understands the following:

    • the relevance of pages;
    • the relationship between pages;
    • and the value of pages.

    There are several things to consider to set up your internal linking strategy. How you go about it depends on your site and goals, but the following steps are a good rule of thumb.

    1. Determine the ideal structure for your site

    We always advise website owners to imagine their website as a pyramid. On top of it is your homepage; below are some sections or categories, and further down are individual posts and pages — possibly with subcategories in between.

    ideal site structure pyramid

    Your website’s menu should reflect this structure if you do it well. In our Ultimate guide to site structure, you can read how to create the best site structure for your site.

    2. Decide what your most important content is

    It would help if you determined what your most important content is. If you’re not sure, please read our article on cornerstone content. In short, it’s your best and most complete content about the core of your business. It’s the content you want people to find when searching for topics or products you specialize in.

    You must add many links to inform Google that this is your most important content. There are various spots from where you can link to your cornerstone content. Here, we’ll give the most common options, from your post’s copy to your navigation.

    When you’ve written various articles about a certain topic, you should contextually link them. This will show Google – and your users – that those articles are topically related. You can link directly from sentences in your copy or add links at the end of your post.

    Moreover, you want to show Google which articles are your cornerstone: your most complete article on this topic. To do so, you must add a link to the cornerstone in all articles on this topic. And don’t forget to link back from the cornerstone to the individual posts.

    Contextual linking: an example

    Our blog has a cornerstone content article called ‘The ultimate guide to keyword research’. This post will rank for all related search queries about [keyword research] in Google search results.

    So we’ve added links from other relevant articles, such as ‘7 keyword research mistakes to avoid‘, ‘ What is keyword research‘, or ‘Focus on long tail keywords‘ to the main article. And we link back from the main article to these posts. In doing so, Google will understand that the ultimate guide contains the most information about [keyword research]. So, in the end, Google will rank the ultimate guide above the other shorter posts about keyword research.

    If you have hierarchical pages on your website, link parent pages to their child pages and vice versa. Also, don’t forget to link sibling pages to each other. These pages should be related to each other on a well-organized site, and connecting them like this make perfect sense.

    Read all about linking parent and child pages for SEO.

    5. Consider adding a related post section

    You can find many plugins and modules to add complete related post sections to your posts. This is an excellent way to show your posts to more visitors. If you use one, we recommend testing whether the related posts are related. If you’re not sure, linking to posts manually is probably best. That’s what we do on Yoast.com – we select a related post manually (or with a bit of help from our internal linking tool – more on that later) and place a link to that post at the bottom of the article. The related links block in Yoast SEO Premium helps you do this in a jiffy.

    We explain this in detail in this post about linking to related posts.

    Besides linking from topically-related posts and pages, it’s possible to make your cornerstone content more authoritative by adding links from the homepage or the top navigation menu. It would help if you did this with the posts and pages most important to your business. This will give these posts or pages a lot of link value and strengthen them in Google’s eyes.

    Taxonomies, like categories and tags, help you organize your site and help users and Google understand your content. If you have a blog, adding internal links to the taxonomies that the post belongs to could be beneficial. Adding links to the category and tags helps Google understand your blog’s structure and helps visitors navigate related posts more easily.

    For instance, on the first page of our SEO blog, we link to several tag pages, including technical SEO and SEO basics.

    A good practice after you publish a post or page is to link to that newly published post from other content on your site. Of course, the posts or pages that link to the recently published post must be of a similar topic. You shouldn’t just link to this new post from a random post or page on your site.

    Now, this might sound daunting, especially if you regularly publish content. But it’s worth the hassle, as you won’t end up with a bunch of orphaned content that needs fixing. Besides, adding internal links to your most recent posts ensure that search engine crawlers can crawl and index them when they land on other pages on your site.

    The last option to mention is creating internal links to your website’s most popular posts or pages. Preferably create these sections in the sidebar or the footer of your website to have them appear on all pages and posts. As link value passes to these most popular posts from many different pages, they get a boost. Besides, the posts will be more accessible for visitors, increasing traffic – and more traffic is a positive sign for Google.

    You also probably have links that aren’t important for SEO on your website. For example, if you have a login link for your clients on the homepage, you don’t want to leak link value to your login page – that page doesn’t need to rank high in the search results.

    You used to be able to prevent losing link value to unimportant links by giving them a nofollow tag. A nofollow tag asks Google not to follow the link, so no link value is passed. Now you might think: “I’m going to nofollow less important links to give the most important links more link value.” While this worked in the past, Google has become more competent. Now it seems that the link value for those nofollow links doesn’t automatically flow to the other links on the page. The nofollow link will be counted as a link, and the link value will be lost. Therefore it makes more sense to have fewer links on a page instead of nofollowing some of the links.

    Adding a nofollow tag doesn’t mean those target pages can’t be found in Google’s search results. You should give them a noindex tag if you don’t want pages or posts to appear in the search results. The noindex tag means that Google shouldn’t render the page and shouldn’t give the content a place in the Google index to show up in the search results.

    Read more: Why noindex a page or nofollow a link? »

    Anchor texts

    Once you have decided which links should be on a page and which pages should get link value, using the correct anchor text is essential. The anchor text is the clickable text that visitors see. For example, the anchor text of the two internal links in the example below are ‘link schemes’ and ‘paid links’:

    Anchor texts
    You can see the anchor text containing the link in this image.

    If you over-optimize anchor text, you might hurt your website. By over-optimizing, we mean keyword stuffing. Previously, you could give all anchor texts the same keyword, and Google would rank your site higher for that keyword. Nowadays, Google is smart enough to understand that the content around the anchor text says more about the relevancy of a keyword than the anchor text itself. So please ensure the anchor text looks natural in your copy: it’s OK to use keywords but don’t add the same keywords to every link’s anchor text. 

    Keep reading: The context of internal links »

    Internal linking in Yoast SEO

    Yoast SEO includes several checks and features to help you improve your internal linking.

    On a post level, the Yoast SEO plugin helps ensure you give internal links some thought. In the plugin meta box — or the sidebar, as shown below –, the internal link assessment of Yoast SEO checks whether you’ve created links to other pages on your website in your text. It also checks if these links are followed or nofollowed.

    For Yoast SEO for Shopify, this check only works on posts or pages. You do not have internal links on your product pages or product descriptions because you want to keep customers there — not send them to another part of your site. You need your customer to convert as quickly as possible. An essential part of Shopify SEO, right?

    Checking if you've added enough internal links in Yoast SEO
    Checking if you've added enough internal links in Yoast SEO for Shopify only works in posts and pages, not products

    Add internal contextual links to relevant content on your site to get a green bullet for this check.

    Text link counter

    If you install Yoast SEO for WordPress, you’ll also get a handy tool in your post overview called the text link counter. This tool counts the internal links in a post and the internal links pointing to a post. This visualizes which posts should receive more links. This will all help you work purposely on your site structure.

    You can see the number of internal links pointing to and from a post with Yoast SEO

    Easy internal linking with Yoast SEO Premium

    The internal linking suggestion

    You are probably aware of the importance of internal linking for SEO. But handpicking articles – and relevant articles – to link to isn’t always easy. Even if you have a small website, you might not remember every little thing you’ve published over the years. And suppose you’re managing a medium to large website, especially one where various people can write and publish content. In that case, knowing all your content on a given topic is difficult. When this happens, internal linking can take much more of your time than it should.

    That’s precisely why we’ve built a dedicated feature in Yoast SEO Premium for internal linking – the internal linking suggestion. It’s incredibly easy to use, and you only need to set up this feature once. Yoast SEO will first scan, analyze and try to make sense of all your content in WordPress. Then when you write a post, you can immediately link to a related post by copying or dragging the link directly into the editor. You’ll see the suggestions in the Yoast SEO sidebar on the right-hand side of your screen. For instance, the screenshot below shows the internal linking suggestions for this post you’re reading! The green tick indicates that we’re linking to the suggested post from this one.

    This feature makes internal linking much more intuitive. And that’s thanks to Yoast SEO content analysis running in real-time in the background. It analyses and compares your text to existing content on your site to pick out articles that best fit your new post, all while you’re writing! Even if the articles were written a while ago or by someone else on your team, Yoast SEO won’t miss them. This will help you create an outstanding structure by connecting related content without immediately overlooking articles you might not think of.

    the internal linking feature suggests 4 posts that are related to this post you're reading. We do use these suggestions and link to those 4 posts in this post.
    Internal linking suggestions by Yoast SEO Premium for this article

    The cornerstone approach internal linking workout

    Getting your internal links back in shape is important because that helps you rank with the content you want to rank. That’s why we’ve introduced the cornerstone content internal linking workout in Yoast SEO Premium. You can use this workout to improve your internal linking based on the cornerstone approach we discussed earlier. In six easy steps, you can improve your site structure by learning where to find your cornerstones, how many links they have, and how to add links pointing to these important posts.

    The first step in the cornerstone content workout in Yoast SEO Premium

    The orphaned content internal linking workout

    Orphaned content is pages and posts with no internal links. That makes them hard for users to find and also hard for search engines to crawl. In the orphaned content workout, we identify your orphaned content and give you all the options and tools you need to deal with it! Maybe you don’t want those pages to be found. Maybe you want to delete them. Or maybe you want these pages to rank in Google and be found by your visitors. Whatever you decide for each page, the steps in this SEO workout make it easy to clean up your content.

    The first step in the orphaned content workout in Yoast SEO Premium

    When you have our Premium plugin, you can find these internal linking workouts in the backend of your WordPress website. Go to Yoast SEO in your left menu, and select the menu item ‘Workouts’. This will take you to a page where you can find our workouts. Of course, we’ll add other SEO workouts as we go along, which you’ll also find here when they’re released!

    Go Premium and unlock this feature!

    Unlock our internal linking features and get free access to all of our SEO courses with Yoast SEO Premium:

    Get Yoast SEO Premium Only €99 EUR / year (ex VAT)

    Child and sibling block

    In the WordPress block editor, you can also easily link child and sibling pages with Yoast SEO premium. If you want to make sure you link all child and sibling pages, just select the sibling or subpages block, add it to your post, and you’re done. Of course, this only works for hierarchical post types.

    Find all the Yoast SEO blocks in the block editor

    Orphaned content filter

    Yoast SEO Premium has an orphaned content filter to make finding posts that aren’t linked even easier. This feature allows you to see which posts and pages aren’t linked to at all, by other posts and pages on your website. Using the filter, finding important posts that need more inbound internal links is a piece of cake!

    Go link your content

    Without links, your content can’t rank! With a solid internal linking strategy, you can show which content is related and which of your articles are most informative and valuable. If you follow the guidelines in this post both Google and your users will understand your site better, which will, in turn, increase your chance of ranking.

    Read on: Site structure: the ultimate guide »

    The post Internal linking for SEO: Why and how? appeared first on Yoast.