Website structure defines how fast customers will be able to navigate through your website pages. However, it goes down not only to the categorization or pagination. Magento 2 cross-linking matters too.
Crosslinks help you to improve your website SEO value and spread the link juice among multiple pages that are being linked. It is a great way to improve your product page SEO and help search crawlers understand the structure of your pages.
Unfortunately default Magento functional enables you only to add cross-links manually, which is extremely time-consuming. To automate the internal linking process you need the Magento 2 SEO extension. So here you'll learn how to enable auto cross-links in Magento.
However, to start with let's define what is cross-linking in terms of SEO.
What is Cross Linking in SEO?
Cross-linking is the process of adding links on relevant keywords from one page of your website to the other. Cross-linking has immense SEO potential in terms of delivering a better customer experience and better indexing. It helps to build the page authority and allows customers to jump to the relevant content faster.
How to Add Cross Links in Magento 2?
1. Navigate to Stores > Configuration > Magefan Extensions > SEO > Cross Links, enable them and select what to Use Auto Cross Links For. Don't forget to Save the configuration.
2. Go to Marketing > SEO & Search > Cross Links and press the Add New Cross Link button.
3. Fill out the Cross Link Information.
- Enable Keyword option enables the cross-link.
- Specify the Keyword you want to add the link to.
- Enter the URL (either relative or absolute) and the URL Title.
- Select the URL Target that defines whether to open the URL in a new window or not.
- Enable the Use Nofollow option if you don't want the search crawlers to follow your cross-link.
- Set Priority. The smaller the number the higher the priority of the keyword.
e.g. you want to link Women Jackets keywords to the category page and Jackets to a product page. Women Jackets keyword has 0 priority and Jackets — 1. In this example, the cross-link will be created for Women Jackets since the priority number is lower.
4. Set up the cross-link Display Settings.
- Specify the Store View where the cross-link should be added.
- Set what the cross-link will be Available for. You can use the settings you've selected in the configuration or select a specific location for the cross-link.
- Select what Categories to use the cross-link for.
Note: categories you select in the Use For Categories field should correspond to the Categories field on product pages since the extension takes this value from there.
e.g. if you select the Women category for the cross-link and it doesn't appear, it might be that the product you want the cross-link to be added to has lower-level categories (Tops, Bottom, Jackets, Hoodies, etc.) assigned to that product and not the Women category.
- Define the time during which the cross-link should be available in the Active From/Active To field.
- Select the Occurrence that defines what keywords on the page to apply the link to — first, seconds, third, or randomly.
- Set the Number Of Replacements. It specifies how many cross-links to add to the keyword if there are several of them on the page.
Pro tip: usually you don't have to add a multitude of the same links across the page, so it's better to keep the default value (1).
Once you finish, don't forget to check the cross-links in the Magento storefront. Based on the cross-link settings, you should see a corresponding link applied to the keyword you've set.
Here's the "gear" cross-link we've added in this example. However, there are also "jackets" and "pullover" keywords leading to different pages.
You can add cross-links to any page of your store and display them on products, categories, Magefan blog posts, CMS blocks, and pages. It is a great contribution to your SEO strategy and customer experience. Not speaking about the time it saves you by applying links automatically.
Check it out on our live demo and try to enable cross-links yourself to make sure it is super fast and easy.
