 Thank you, thank you, that was a wonderful introduction, yes, I'm here to talk about improving your internal linking structure, so my name is Marike van de Racht, I'm one of the co-owners of Yoast and the founder of Yoast's Academy, that's our online courses platform, you should check that out, that's great, and I was originally going to give you five tips on how to improve your site structure, but as this is a lightning talk, I can do three, and you can come talk to me later if you want to hear the other two. But first, why internal linking? We all know backlinks are important for SEO, right, for ranking, but why internal linking? Why is this even a thing? Well, there are three reasons why internal linking is important, and the first one has to do with your audience, your user, your reader, your internal linking structure will make or break your audience's experience, will make sure they find their way around your website. The second reason has to do with Google. So Google crawls your website, it follows your links, and the content it finds, it saves in the index, so that's a really large database in which all of our websites are saved. So internal linking makes sure that your content is indexed, but it's also like a guide for Google, it established the relationship between the pages, so internal linking is also important to get ranked. And then there's another reason why internal linking is important, that actually has to do with Google as well. So on your website, you're probably writing about similar topics, like at Jo's, we tend to write a lot about SEO, and if we do not tell Google which one of our articles is most important, we'd actually be competing with our own blog posts for a higher ranking in Google, so you can solve that with a good internal linking structure. So three things why internal linking is important, it's important that your audience will find what they are looking for, it's important that Google will understand your website, and it's important that you'll not be competing with your own content. So we now know why, just how do you do that, how do you improve your internal linking. So the first and maybe the most important tip is to decide upon your most important pages, which are the pages to post you're most proud of, which are the ones you want to rank highest with in Google. So whenever SEOs tend to talk about most important pages, we tend to talk about cornerstone content, and cornerstone content are these great overarching articles, which are lengthy and well written, and they usually tackle the most competitive key words. I would tell a little bit about keyword and keyword research later, but the point is, you should think about this. Which are the articles that make people come back to your website? Which are the articles that make people to buy your stuff and to like your pages? Which are the articles you're most proud of? Ask yourself these questions, because if you don't have these questions right, then you are putting the wrong articles on top of your pal, and you will be ranking with the wrong articles. You don't want that. So you've decided upon your most important content. What to do next? This is important. You have to link from the tail to the head. I'm going to explain this. So you have competitive keywords. Everybody wants to rank for these. They're like vacation in the Netherlands. Everybody wants to rank for vacation in the Netherlands. So there's a lot of competition there. Really hard to rank for. If you would try to rank for vacation in the south of the Netherlands, maybe in the north of the Netherlands, nobody wants to go north of the Netherlands, then there will be less competition. So it would be much easier to rank for. Right? So in my case, I wrote this beautiful article about the search structure, which is called the ultimate guide for site structure. But that's a competitive term. I also wrote five different articles, each focusing on a slightly different aspect of site structure, like site structure, FIQ, internal linking, site structure practices, and all of these articles, these are optimized for long-tail keywords. They actually generate lots of traffic combined. But then the internal linking part comes in. I put links from all of these little articles, all of these long-tail variants, to the one, the most important one, the ultimate guide. And then you'll be showing Google that that one, the ultimate guide. That's actually the most important one. So Google will come along, crawl your website, and we'll see that you have pointed towards the one you want to rank for the most. So link from the tail to the head. That means link from the articles that are less important to the one that's most important. And then my third and final tip comes in. You have to make sure you link in context. So we spend a lot of time in the WordPress community, but also in the SEO community, which is totally different, by the way. And what comes back there is the word context. So Bill Schlosske, who's like this SEO veteran guy, he says that context is actually the SEO word of 2018. And I think he's right. So what we're seeing is that Google becomes more and more able to grasp the true meaning of your text. So in the old days, when you wanted to rank for the term ballet shoes, you had to have to use the word ballet shoes in every other sentence. But nowadays, if you use the word ballet shoes and maybe dancing shoes, ballet recital, dancing, I know a lot about ballet, then Google will just understand from the whole context what your topic is about. So the same will go for links. If you put a link from one page to another, which is totally unrelated, Google will understand that you did that. And that will not help with your ranking. If you put a link in, that's related. That's actually making sense to link to another article. Then Google will see that. And that will help with your ranking. This means that internal links are important to get your site indexed. And the context of internal links is important to get your site ranked. So all of these internal links are important because Google will crawl them, no matter what, and get your site indexed. But in establishing which page will rank the highest, you'll need to have context. So I talked to you about three tips on just how to improve your internal linking. We talked about deciding upon your most important pages. We talked about linking from the tail to the head. And we talked about linking in context. So that's it. Questions? Quick for me. We have time for one or two questions. I have a hand here in the third row. And then one over here. And that will be our two questions. Thank you. Hi. When you say linking context, do you use exact match keywords or you also use LSI keywords? Or you mix it up to make sense and then link to stuff? I think you should just think about it and think whether or not it makes sense. So if you're thinking too much into words, you're probably overdoing it. One of my other tips is using our internal linking tool, which actually looks at which articles you've already written resemble the ones you are writing now. And these would be good to link to. So let's say we have a security page and then we have malware pages and other blog posts. So we want to rank for service page. So we use relevant anchor tags. And then on other ones, we can use LSI keywords and others. Or you meant like a longer text that makes sense. I actually meant the longer text. And I don't mean to say that the other things won't work. But in my case, it's more about writing and linking from one post to another, which are related to each other. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. And we had a question over on this side, please. Thank you. You talked about link from the tail to the head. Yes. But then these cornerstone article will probably mention subjects that were also in the tail pages. So is it harmful for the ranking to blink back to those? No. You just have to make sure that all of the ones are linking toward that one. And you can link back, but you should make sure that you're not linking towards another one as well. So choose one and make sure that you link to all of them. And you can link within each other as well, but you have to make sure that the most links get to the most important one. Okay. So that's about the most out of all the ones in the website. Yeah. In that category. Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Marika lives for this stuff. If you're not following her blog on the subject, you really should. Will you please give it up for Dr. Marika Van Der Racht.