Thank you for this guide. It was very helpful and clear.
I had 2 questions:
1. One of my client's website has home page (main keyword - ranking well already) and then 1 level down of pages related to the main keyword. That is how the whole website is structured. The site literally only has homepage as first tier and then site-wide sidebar navigation linking to rest of the 15 inner pages that are closely related to the keyword. Your bat example can be applied. So the site is about baseball bats and then inner pages are wooden baseball bats, aluminum baseball bats, etc.
Every inner page on the site has navigation sidebar which shows links to the rest of the pages related to the main homepage keyword.
The inner pages are generally ranking well... all on the first page... although they are not competitive kws.
Should I look into building out categories of the related products of the homepage or should i just focus on building internal links from pages to each other?
Even though the pages are very closely related to the homepage, they can still be potentially put in categories, realistically.
What approach should I take?
If building categories is a good idea, does the URL structure tell google that categories exist so juice and authority can flow? By that I mean, would the silo HAVE to be in this URL structure? --> Example
www.baseballbats.com linking to -> baseballbats.com/wood/ linking to --> baseballbats.com/wood/cheapest-wooden-bats/
or can i get away with baseballbats.com/wood/ linking to ---> baseballbats.com/cheapest-wooden-bats/ directly and that would still count as proper silo?
The reason why I ask this is because I personally do not want the landing page urls of the keyword related pages to change as they are already ranking well. I hope you get my point. What are your thoughts?
Also, the site has no body links going anywhere to any of the pages currently. Just navigation sidebar links connecting the whole website.
2. Do you use keywords while interlinking in general or leave it natural anchors?
