SEO or natural referencing is one of the most effective web marketing levers. It allows you to position yourself permanently in the search results of Google or any other search engine. However, many people mistakenly think that it is only a question of significantly increasing the number of visits to a site. SEO is much more than that! In addition to increasing traffic, its goal is to qualify it. You can indeed attract thousands of visitors, if the positioned pages do not meet the search or the need of the Internet user, you cannot hope for a good conversion rate (and your bounce rate will slowly kill your SEO natural).
To acquire more quality traffic, there are 4 SEO levers that you will need to activate: internal linking, link obfuscation, semantic writing and net linking.
What are the challenges of internal networking?
If the SEO service strategies of external links are well known, the optimization of internal links is a little less so. However, it is a key element that allows, among other things, to increase the authority of your pages. On the UX side, it also improves accessibility and helps bots better understand your site’s architecture. They will thus be able to correctly distribute the “SEO juice” to your most strategic pages. Contrary to popular belief, a good internal link is not just a good menu with categories, subcategories, pages, etc. The majority of site audits often identify the following two issues:
The most strategic pages do not receive enough links
This is a very common case, especially in e-commerce, because many people think that the tree structure of the site is enough to link the pages together. However, things usually get complicated at the level of the sub-categories, which often contain filters whose landing pages only depend on the link on the filter. However, these are pages that can capture middle and long tail requests, which are just as important as the top tail. To improve your internal networking, you must therefore focus on this type of page, which is deeper in your site and which is not directly attached to your menu.
Pages have too many internal links
“More links” does not mean “link everywhere and anyhow”. Many CMS plugins offer the possibility of automatic internal linking. Alas, if used incorrectly, they can generate tons of scattered links that would break any logic or consistency between pages. The mega menu is often a big part of the problem.
While there is no “ideal number” of internal links, you must keep in mind that a good internal link must be justified to meet the needs of users and by extension, robots. Does it make sense to find a link to running sneakers while looking at pumps? Not really! So, this link does not exist. You should also categorize topics using the siloing method, which will help you create consistent “clusters” of links.
Obfuscation of links to better direct robots
Obfuscation is one of the methods used to optimize an internal mesh. It simply consists of “hiding” links from robots to encourage them to browse only the on page SEO service strategic pages. This remains completely transparent for the Internet user who can still click and go to the destination page whose link is obfuscated. Obfuscation is necessary today to control your crawl budget because Google does not give us the possibility to clearly indicate to it the most important pages for us.
This method is therefore essential to prevent robots from getting lost in pages that are too deep and/or not very qualitative. Technically, obfuscated links must appear in the form of JavaScript buttons encoded in base 64.
If you want to know more about good SEO practices, in addition to my site, visit this blog on SEO, very comprehensive on e-reputation, natural referencing, content marketing and which will give you good advice on how to use Google Ads.
Semantic writing to enrich your site
Semantic writing aims to give more meaning to the words you use in your content. It allows you to optimize your content according to the real intention of your Internet users and not just to respond to a simple request. Semantic writing gives more “depth” to your content. As a result, your site will appeal to Google, whose mission is to direct Internet users to pages where they will find exactly what they are looking for.
Semantics also allows you to position yourself on a wider range of keywords, over a much longer period. Semantic writing therefore consists in understanding the deep meaning of the Internet user’s intention in order to strategically place certain elements in your content. To help you, I recommend very good semantic writing tools like YourtextGuru or SEOQuantum.
Netlinking to strengthen its on-site actions
Net linking is the process of acquiring external links from other websites to yours. The hyperlink is a means for users and for robots to navigate the web. It is also one of the vectors of popularity for a site. Search engines rely on the number and quality of links a site receives to determine whether it is relevant to its theme and whether it should be well positioned.
There are many techniques to build links, but they require mastering a number of SEO concepts such as link anchor optimization, popularity metrics (TrustFlow, Domain Authority…), etc. Netlinking is indeed one of the most powerful levers, but also the most dangerous if it is not correctly set up, because it goes against Google’s rules. It is therefore better to entrust it to an expert who will be able to advise you on the type of links to set up as well as their frequency.
In conclusion
These 4 levers therefore constitute the pillars of natural referencing. They make it possible to increase traffic while reaching the right targets. You will of course also have to think about taking care of the ergonomics of your site if you want to encourage Internet users to stay on your site. UX can today be considered an important SEO lever.
