Hi, guys, welcome to another video in this series of Shopify SEO. This video we're going to talk about internal linking. Now this is a really underutilized strategy in not only eecom stores, but certainly most websites online. And its internal linking should be a pretty standard practice for most websites, most ecommerce stores, but we find certainly a lot of Shopify stores and a lot of our clients haven't implemented correct or any strategy with their internal linking. So we're just going to go through and look at what internal linking easy if you're a little more advanced, you'll already know what it is and how it works, but we'll just go through the basics of what an internal link is, and then talk about how we can set internal links up correctly on our Shopify store. Very simply just to start, what's an internal link?

An internal link is where you link A particular part of the site back to another page or another product or another collection page within the same site. So you can see here, this link here, and if we click through that would go to that particular product, and it's linked to. Now also, internal links are classed as your menu as well. So we're going to look at how we set up a menu properly, because that's certainly an area that people don't understand that it has an impact on your internal linking and your anchor text. And when we talk about anchor text, with a content link, so for example, here we have a internal link here, the anchor text is actually the text that is written within the link. So the way this anchor texts work, it's essentially the main purpose of an anchor text link, when it was originally created was to provide a relevant way to tell a user what the link is.

So if you have anchored to Next, that explains a particular term, it would make sense that if you click that link, you would go to a page that was relevant to that term. But this also has a very important impact on your search engine optimization as well. So when Google and other search engines come and look at your store, or your site, and they see internal links, pointing to particular pages, they want to see that it's relevant to the term that you've, you've actually used an anchor with. So for example, this anchor text quality of these plush toys, it would be correct or likely to assume, and Google will assume the same. If you click through to the this page that it's linking to, that would it would it be about quality, plush toys. So that's how Google can understand the relevancy and the quality of a particular page using anchor text.

I could text in the past has been abused, so people and when Master's in SEO is good use anchor over use their anchor text both with External links and internal links, trying to gain the search engines to improve the ranking of a particular page by having multiple anchor text of the same type of anchor text pointing to a page. But Google's got smarter. And now this is obviously not the ideal way to actually build your anchor text. And if anything, less is more, but it really depends on the market. It depends on the competition of the particular category. And it also depends on the strength, age and authority of your site.

If you've got a really old site on an age domain, that's been around a long time and historically done well. Very often, you'll see that Google is a little more lenient on those type of sites than say, a brand new store. So you just need to be aware that you certainly don't want to be over optimizing your anchor text with your internal linking or any links for that matter, that you do need need to have some sort of relevance. When you using internal links within your site, so the type of anchor texts that we were going to look at, firstly, there's a generic anchor text. So this is simple anchor text such as clicky. More here, check here and these are important for using within your site and then any other terms, you know hundreds of them that you might use just to to link to another page.

Then you have URL anchor text. So the anchor text even out links to that page would actually the anchor text would actually be that URL. Then we have exact anchor, so if we will try to target the term Mario Brothers toy for Mario Brothers toy collection page in the exact match anchor would be Mario Brothers toy. And then a partial anchor would be where you might have Mario Brothers toy in the anchor text but you're surrounded by other co occurring type terms. So we want to use a combination of all these type of anchor texts with our internal links. And also the other one you could put in there is Image, Image links.

So they're not essentially anchor text, links, but they are links that are relevant from an image. If an image has got an alt tag or a file name, Google is going to take that file name. And I'll take into account if the image links to a particular page. So working through a site, we're firstly going to look at our menu and homepage internal linking. Then we're going to look at related products and posts. And there's some apps we can use for that.

And we're going to look at collection pages and product pages and then our blog posts or pages. Okay, firstly, we're going to look at our internal linking on our homepage. So as I mentioned, menus are an important internal link resource. But if you're not careful, Google will take into account anchor text for menus. So you need to be careful how you optimize these. So for example, on our poorly optimized site here, here, we have the menu.

For the collection, plush toys, but you can see with the anchors, we've got large plush toys, Disney plush toys, and plush soft toys. So in this example plush toys was certainly overused and over optimized for what is optimum. So what we'll do is go and actually change the menu anchors, and D optimize these a little. So for baby and toddler, this one here, we would maybe remove the term baby because we've already got baby in the top level URL, and then also remove the term toys. For action figures, we maybe will remove the term action and maybe even instead having figure range with figures we will call this and on figurines, Plants vs Zombies is fine, because these are de optimized compared to the top level URL. So the way you do that with your main with your menus is you just you go to the navigation dashboard on the back end of your Shopify store, and then you can actually change the anchor text for your menus.

So for this plush menu item we were talking about we're going to change this to large will take out plush toys. Then we're going to change this to Disney take out plush toys and we could take out toys and soft would you save it and then when we go and refresh that page we can see now that we have plush laughs Disney and soft. And this is probably highly highly conservative. But it's a good place to start, you get an idea of how your pages react. And then you can certainly pad these out a little bit later on, depending on how the collection pages and the site itself reacts to a lot of the other changes nerds we've worked on through this course. These because Google is quite sensitive to anchor changes, you get an idea reasonably quickly and you can come back and edit these as you go.

But starting D optimized, being a little more conservative conservative To start with, is always a better way to go in our opinion. So I go through the the other menu items, but you get the idea and how you can make sure these menu items are not optimized or over optimized. As I mentioned, menu items are taken into account for anchor text. So you need to consider these when you're looking at your anchor text on your homepage and throughout the site. Okay, next I'm going to look at is related products and posts. Now what Shopify doesn't do by default is create related products in most themes, the counter by theme, which we're using here, it's actually part of the theme, we're what it will do, it will add in our related products or products, the same things related to this particular product in the bottom section here, and so it automatically creates an internal linking for related products throughout the store.

And this is pretty standard practice for a lot of sites and e commerce stores but you just highly recommend that you look at ensuring you've got your related products added in. And if you don't have it on your theme. Certainly there are plenty of apps out there where you can you can install them Some are free and some are paid, not going to go through how to do that you can find them on the Shopify App Store. But highly recommend that you add your your related products internal linking year on your product pages. Now, you should consider also having a related post, app or feature on your blog post. So it works similar to product pages.

So in terms of related products, but here we are relating product, writing blog posts, so when you've got a blog, a blog post written at the bottom here will automatically pull in a related blog posts on a particular topic or category, and it will place them here and then link them here. And by having a read more generic anchor text, it's very safe to do that. So this is where you should look at adding your related posts up on your Shopify store. So if you're using eecom turbo theme, what would I'm just going to show you how to install that with a free app. So just in the App Store, the free app that we use a lot is called related blog posts. Simple as that.

So you just install it on your store. So once you've installed the app, just navigate to the actual app itself. And it'll give you this bit of code here that we need to add to our liquid theme. We're just going to copy that. There's some other settings here are just generally leave them by default, but you can you can change the number of posts, you're going to display in a related post sections and some other settings here. Then we are going to go back to our theme and go to Edit code.

And we're going to look for the article dot liquid file, which is right here under templates. I'm going to open it up And then we're going to look for line 20, which is right here. And we're just going to paste that code in right behind the article template piece of code, just like that, hit save, and then navigate to particular blog post, the related posts will be added to the bottom. So what I did was actually deleted it out and now I'm just showing how to add it back in and they are there so that they'll display a little bit differently on what theme you use. But most themes out there don't have related post section and built in automatically so you generally have to go and find the plug in and this is the the free plugin for starters and also one of the easiest to install.

Okay, collection pages. So now we're just going to go and have a look at how we Add our internal links to our collection pages. So we're going to use this one as an example. And generally what I like to do in the collection pages is link to all three parts of the website. So you would internally link with different anchor texts to other collection pages, you will internally link to product pages and you will internally link to blog posts and you would do that on every collection page of your site. So for example, here, the top part of the description, and we've got popular large plush toys as text within our content.

So we might link these to the large plush toys collection. So grab the link, and then we add and insert the link. So this is a partial anchor text or partial match anchor text. So we're targeting a large plush toys but we've got popular in this so just breaks up the anchor text a little bit. So we would add that into our In turn Lanka, generally, if you've only got a couple of lines or a paragraph in this top section, putting in a link, one link to another collection is a good idea. Okay, so now we'll go and look at their other links using opt in.

So here we are looking at our collection page and our content at the bottom of the page. And so then we can just work through and look at other options to internally link back to collection pages, blog posts and product pages. So we have here, okay, he's another one I've deleted is highlighted in red, so I can find them when I looked at them before. So this popular action figures, we would link that back to our action figure. Just go up and find the link. So there's our action figure collection.

So we put that link in there. There's that link Yeah soft in cue collectibles. So again, another longer tail partial match anchor. So with this anchor it make sense that we add it to the soft, plush toys. So grab the soft link and then we can add that link in there. And then down here we've got a product.

So this one here, we would link to an actual the actual product. So generally what I like to do these toys are actually not in our store in the store yet. But generally, what you'd like we'd like to do is have maybe four or five on the collection page four or five toys that you want to target a little bit more deeper or focus on a little bit. And then you can add that little bit of information about them, like we explained when we're adding this content and then link back to the actual product of that Particular the product page of that particular product. So this one would be the patient at PBS that toy. So here is the URL for that particular toy.

And we can add it in here. Now we've got the URL pointing back to that product page from relevant content. And also, what we like to do is also link to a blog post. You can link it to more than one blog post if you want. So this text here collecting the best plush toys, we're going to link it to the top horror plush toys in the market right now. So it's about plush toys.

And we've actually got a section about Plants vs. Zombies. So we'll link it to this particular blog post here. Okay, so now we've covered pretty well, all our bases, we have links pointing to collection pages, we have links pointing to products. And you might, you might add three or four more links in here, pointing to particular products, and we have a link pointing to a blog post, you don't want to overdo it on a collection page might have 1000 words, and you probably don't want to link it any more than three, four or five times. Certainly you want some kind of relevant anchor link pointing back to those particular parts of the site. And when you add that up and do it over all your collection pages, and you add your links to other parts of the site, you just get a nice internal anchor link profile.

And one thing I would say if you're going to add exact match anchors anyway, it you should do it on your collection page and use it as a hub. So when you start looking at off page optimization, you would target the collection pages and then the exact match anchor can point back to that particular product, but you only want to use the eggs Match match anchor on the site once only, so, to maximum. So if you're looking for the best plush toy, and that is your core anchor that you're looking to target, you would only use that anchor once on the entire site, and the best place to put it would be in your collection page. And that's what we see works best in our opinion. And then when you build links to your collection page, to power up your collection page page, you would use variations and generic and URL type anchor links pointing to this collection page from outside of your store.

Now one other link that's important. It's not an internal link, but we like to add them to our collection pages and also a blog post is an external link to a high quality site within the same market and relevant so sites like Wikipedia, other competitors that are say you could link to Amazon or in this sense, Toys R Us those type of stores that you can do a Google search. And if they're ranking well for a competitive keyword, you're generally going to be safe, high quality sites. So you can look at maybe just one outbound link on your collection page. And so Google takes into account outbound links to quality sites, so that's why you would want to do that. Okay, for each products product page, we also like to look at adding some internal links.

You don't overdo it though, because you don't have as much content on your product pages general. You might add one link back to a collection. So for example, here we've got babies and toddlers. And here we have toddler toys. So we might link that back to our relevant collection. And then let's say we have a range of Other elephant toys in our store, we could then also link with a longtail and other elephant toys here and link that back.

So generally, that's a good a good option to have one or two links in your product pages as well. And you're just building out that internal link profile once more and just being careful not to use the same anchor text too many times and certainly be very careful with your exact match match anchor text, right throughout your site. And the last one is obviously our blog posts. So blog posts looking in a similar setup to our collection pages where you would link out to maybe one other collection, maybe two, and then also some products. So if you have when you're looking, you've created a blog post and you're talking about a specific product like this one here it's talking about a specific toy, then you could actually link back to a product page from that blog post, but it's also a good idea to link to the collection page.

Have that of those products as well. So you just again, just build out that internal anchor profile. So that's essentially the core foundation for your internal linking of your Shopify eecom store. So you make sure your menu is set up correctly just to summarize, and not over optimized, you look at installing related products in a related post app of some sort to ensure you have that related post and product set up within your store. If you've got the oddities in app, and you were able to add that extra content on your collection pages, gives you a great opportunity to improve your internal link profile by by using the collection page content to do that, and then you can also you can obviously add more links and your when you've got more content, so it wouldn't be a great idea to have only a little paragraph in your copy or collection page and have five or six links.

Shooting out from there. And you want to you want good content surrounding those links to support them. product pages one to two links out to collection pages and to other products as mentioned, and then obviously a blog pages pages are set up the same as their collection pages. Again, just like the collection page video, I can emphasize enough the importance of setting up your internal link profile within your store. It's an overlooked and underutilized strategy in many Shopify stores we see and it just helps pair up the entire store and start to Google really start to crawl a site correctly and, and provide that relevance you need to improve your rankings. Thanks, we'll see you in the next video.