How to Fix Your Website's Internal Links for Humans and SEO

this website outdoor troop has well over a thousand blog posts and for a while long time it's struggled with cluttered messy disorganized internal links but here's how we transform that chaos into a clean human first structure that is going to help not only with engagement on the website but also with topical Authority which is SEO is your website currently optimized both for search engines and for people we're going to find out here exactly how to fix

that in this video you're going to learn how a human first redesign we're going to focus on people and engagement first and primarily we're going to do that with how we link between the articles on our website and how we structure our navigation these things seem really simple but you're going to see how this is going to impact the way people interact with the website as well as SEO and lead to better numbers because we're going

to increase user satisfaction and we're going to improve SEO and hopefully authoritativeness even with Google okay so like most of you that already have websites and you have blog content for years and years and years what we could get away with was we would write articles that were intended to answer specific questions that people were searching on the web now that's not inherently a bad thing if I write content that helps somebody answer the question they're

looking for that should be great but we focused so much over those years and by we I mean this whole industry we focus so much on optimizing to make sure that our content content was the best content according to Google's algorithm for those specific search queries we may have lost sight in many cases of the actual person that's doing the searching and with the rise of AI generated content that allowed really bad content to proliferate like

crazy I honestly believe Google really didn't have much of a choice but to start leaning on other indicators to prove the authoritativeness of websites and so now we're having to do several things and one of those things is to do exactly what Google's been telling us ever since helpful content started and that is to focus on creating content for humans not for algorithms and if we didn't do that it's coming back to bite us so that's

where we're at today we're going to focus on humans we're going to look at this website outdoor troop now like many of you it's this is a website that exists already and it's got lots of content like I said well over a thousand blog posts it's going to be hard to do much restructuring if we're going to have to do everything manually so we're going to rely on some tools here to help us through the process

now the first tool that we're going to use is a staging website if you've never set up a staging website before this is not complicated and it's something that you should consider if you're ever making a large change to the website now if you're using another host a lot of other hosts have staging website options but I'm going to show you how I do it on cloudways and just how easy and fast it is to set

up now cloudways is the sponsor of this video and the reason for that is that I trust and have been using cloud ways for years now I've never stuck with a single host for more than about 2 years before until now in fact I'm not sure I've stuck with anybody for even two years until cloudways who I've been with for about three years and I don't have any reason to ever move one of the cool features

of cloudways that we're talking about today like I said is staging websites so I'm going to go to one of my sites so this is what kind of my dashboard area looks like for Pantry preparedness and this is super easy I just go here on the left side to stage management and I click launch staging application I choose what server I want it on I'm going to put it on the same server and it even reminds

me which one this one's on I'll go ahead and put it on the same server and click continue now it's just going to create that and this will just take another minute or two and then I'll have a staging site set up and I'll show you how to access it all right now that that's stopped going I can go ahead and go back to my server and click on this it's a staging site and this is

how we're going to access it see this where it says application URL I'm going to go ahead I can click that right there and it's going to open that up in a link now it's giving me a username and a password now the reason that a password protects it is so that other people don't accidentally come see the staging version of your website now you'll notice though look at the URL for my staging site it's not

out uh Pantry preparedness.com right it's something entirely different based on cloudways so the odds of somebody accidentally accessing it are pretty slim which means if you want to you can turn off password protection I can just go to the page and notice that this looks this looks exactly like my own website Pantry preparedness it's because it's a perfect duplicate so I can do the same things I can just go to WP admin and then I just

log in with my normal credentials for Pantry preparedness but now here's what this allows me to do it allows me to make all the changes that I want to make right here on the staging site I could literally change the theme I could change the overall site design and do a ton of different things and then when I'm done all I have to do is come back here to cloudways go to staging management and click push

when I click push it's going to say what do you want to change to the live application I'm saying just go overwrite all of it and uh go ahead and take a backup of the live one just in case something happens in this process and then I click proceed and it's just going to take everything I changed for that staging site push it back onto the live site and you're good to go all the changes happen

and it happens very fast and we've already been able to test it because we've been able to goof around on the staging site and make sure that whatever changes we made all worked the way that they were expected to so here on outdoor troop we're literally looking at a staging site I can make a bunch of changes and the actual outdoor tr.com will stay the same until I'm done and then we'll go push it back so

it's an awesome feature a lot of different hosts have it and I'm telling you when you're using cloudways it's super easy you can do it yourself and then if you do run into a problem their supports always super friendly so big thanks to cloudways shout out to them yes they are sponsoring the video but I have been and will continue to be a loyal customer for years to come all right but I want to show you

what the issue is here now this website isn't doing it too bad from a just overall user navigation standpoint if we just consider the menu structure so we can see some of the complexity here kind of with navigation and internal linking and stuff just by viewing here just how much content is on the site and how split up it all is okay so look at what we've got here on the homepage this is just the main

menu bar and we're relying on that for people to be able to find all the different content on the website that that in a search bar here the reality is again we've been expecting for the most part that people are going to come to the website because they did a search on Google and Google sent them to one specific piece of content but that's not what's totally happening anymore and in fact what we want is people

to become familiar with the brand want to come to the website and then maybe peruse maybe read multiple articles so that's what we're going to work on making happen so let's look at this I mean every single one of these if I just click on one like cabins instead of just taking me to a bunch of blog posts like on most blogs it takes me to a landing page which is great right because we got building

a cabin cabin amenities cabin security and cabin activities tiny homes uh we got all sorts of subcategories within here if I click on one of these it'll take me either to another page with multiple posts like this or in some cases on the site it'll take me to a specific blog post so what's happened is we've just made it e easier for people to kind of get to where they want to be and to sort of

to break it down right because once I get here and I'm looking at cabin amenities maybe I'm more likely to kind of peruse multiple articles but what we're going to talk about today though is about how to interconnect all of these in a way that makes more sense let's dive into one of these blog posts so fireplace versus wood burning stove for cabin I don't see any links anywhere in this entire blog post it's cuz when

I wrote it there weren't a ton of other post on the website but there should be something right in fact ideally what we would do is we would have these blog posts all linking either to each other or to maybe one sort of central post for this whole Sub sub category that is how we can help build topical Authority and show Google and other search engines that we have a lot of content that's all interconnected and

all tied to each other but on the human Centric side that's how we get people to want to keep reading so that's one op option is to sort of cluster content together around maybe a central Hub or to have kind of a web where these all kind of link to each other but if you remember at the very beginning of this video I showed you this this is the internal links report and it's the visual sit

map which is really cool this is something that we get from the link whisper plugin this is a great plugin for this stuff by the way when you have a ton of content on a website it's going to take you forever to manually go through and create all the links you want to literally there's I said over a, since over 1,200 blog posts on this website it's just never going to happen but with this tool I

can see which articles have links which ones don't I can create custom rules and I can make it so that articles only that it suggests to be links for articles using AI even suggest to me links between different articles and I can tell it only suggest other articles within the same category etc etc a lot of really cool things here and but notice that um all the purple ones are external links so a purple circle is

a purple node that's a link or a URL that's being linked out to so you'll notice this one article average cost of a hot air balloon ride with 31 examples well there's 31 examples in that post which is why it leaks out links out to a whole bunch probably about 31 different websites that show you their pricing that makes sense you got a few huge purple nodes YouTube this other YouTube URL in Amazon well that makes

sense look at how many when I hover over one of these look at how many different articles on this website have a link to YouTube how many have a link to Amazon well that makes sense what we like to see though is when some of these blue dots are connected to each other this one it's another hot air balloon one but it's not connected to any other articles that one's not connected to any other blue dots

that one that one gosh the blue dots are not connected to each other and look at all these blue dots they're not connected to anything all these ones out around the edges not connected to anything that is what we want to fix here so here's what we're going to do we're going to add inbound internal links now this part I can do a little bit more manually so I can go through one by one at all

of these that have no internal links so I can scroll through here that one's got zero there's another one with zero and I can look for opportunities to link between them but I can also go here to autol linking and I can create an autolink Rule and what autol linking will let me do is I can pick a certain keyword and that keyword can be multiple words long and then I can choose what I want that

word to link to and then I can say all right anytime that keyword or that little phrase is used in an article within a particular category or subcategory always have it create a link to a specific blog post and that is a way that we could potentially um speed this up and create a bunch of links that all point to the best resource for that specific topic all right so now back to internal linking now what

I just presented to you if I were to go through every single blog post and do that manually that would take me close to forever if I did one a day that would take me four years almost so what are we going to do we're going to want to use a tool now right here we've got link whisper I showed you that cool report here I can actually just there's an article here it shows me I

have zero links linking to it from other links on my website uh for other blog posts and stuff I can click add links look it's going to make a bunch of suggestions for me that's pretty cool right so I could take every single post on my website that has maybe fewer than three other articles linking to it and I could let this suggest bunch of things to me and then I could just say yeah add that

link add that link add that link so here let's look at these suggestions the stop is the most popular repelling descender in construction jobs because of these features and so this is best repelling descender and we're saying it should have a link that links to our article about construction harnesses now that makes sense the articles about construction harnesses and this is talking about a descender which you would use only with a harness in a construction job

so yeah let's go ahead check that and add the link so now without even having to go into the post and click edit and all that this recommended at least one specific link to me that I was able to go ahead and just add just like that there are a lot of other cool features within link whisper um they're not sponsoring this video by the way but I like the tool um they've got an autol linking

feature that I can pick specific keywords so even short phrase or anytime that's used anywhere on the website it links to a specific blog post or I can say anytime it's used within any post within a certain category always linked to a specific URL so that can happen automatically we can do Target keywords we can do all sorts of cool things here there's some cool AI tools and recommendations as well within link whisper so there's a

debate that goes on even in my own mind between doing this manually and doing this with a tool if I do this manually I'm probably going to create better contextual links links that make more sense within the context of the article that's written but there's also the question of time and resources and how much can we dedicate to making this happen so what we want to do is make sure that we're internally linking between articles where

it makes sense and then I think the right balance is to make sure that at least sometimes we're doing this manually and when we do it manually we're doing that very deliberately so I want to show you the next way that I like to do internal linking all right so I'm going to go back out here we're back at cabins and this is a topic I know well and again I wrote most of these cabin articles

years ago but here's a perfect opportunity for this building a cabin or even cabin security okay within cabin security I've got what to do before leaving your cabin how to stay safe from dangerous wildlife how to keep it secure from Intruders how to do it cheaply keeping rodents out so we got Pest Control keeping it safe from forest fire there's all these different things around security for your cabin each one of those is a good topic

is there a way that we can put these in a specific order that would make sense for people to read one after another so let's say I've got a cabin and now I'm like all right now I want to make sure that it's protected it's got good security so maybe what's the first thing I'm going to try to protect it from let's go ahead and keep it safe from other people that want to break in all

right so that's maybe step one and then this is just another cool resource within step one right keeping it secure from other people and you're like all right cool but now I want to keep pests out all right cool let's keep them out oh shoot while we're talking Pest Control let's talk termites and um other wood invasive species this one here's around again Intruders so it's another kind of cheap or inexpensive and here's another article about

wildfires so we got two about wildfires okay cool well maybe we've got keeping it safe from other people then we've got keeping out rodents and Pest and then we've got preventing you know it from getting destroyed in a wildfire and then we've got um all the things you should do before you leave your cabin that's again to just kind of make sure all the things are set up so it's kind of like taking all those other

things into account and then we've got oh you know what while I'm at my cabin I should also consider maybe security there maybe that's um like a fstep process okay so what if on the cabin security page instead at the very top of having just a bunch of Articles here what if instead I said five steps to cabin security and that's what showed up here and I wrote out what those five steps were a little blurb

about each one and then step one links out to an article about keeping your cabin safe from Intruders but then this article links out to this one and to this one that are both sub articles that cover different aspects of the same topic now that those all linked together are people going to be more likely once they start are they going to be more likely to read more than one article view more than one page yes

they are and what if each one of those articles also has a link maybe at the top and maybe at the bottom again that links back out to the cabin security overall main page so that they can come back and check out step two and what if the step one article this Intruder article also has a link at the bottom of it so there's one that says back to cabin security and another that says step two

are they going to be more likely to click through to step two yes they are this is what we're calling serial content it's something that we done years ago and they just haven't really done in a long time and it's not something that we've been teaching which is crazy you get less traffic from Google but you get them to stay for four or five pages now suddenly it doesn't matter that Google sent you fewer people and

each of the people that they sent you are more and more and more warmed up to you and more appreciative of your content more likely to click on an affiliate link they viewed more ads and probably even more likely to potentially buy a product from you serial content is the way way to go and it's all about the way we're internally linking and I've just shown you right here the coolest thing ever which is how you

can use your existing content and turn it into serial content you don't even have to start from scratch all of these things are going to be positive changes they're going to give this positive signals to Google but also make it a better experience for users which is what most content creators are completely ignoring so if you have a website now I want to ask you what do you think is the biggest challenge that you're facing to

actually to getting traffic and being able to make a good income from your site and also if you want to learn more about I mean we're going to be talking design here but also SEO U online business and content Creation in general how to be successful at it well that's what this channel is all about so make sure you check out the other content here on this channel I thank you for watching today and I hope

to see you here next time