Internal linking strategies are important, in that they improve your search engine rankings for both post and pages on your blogs…
…and they help increase page views and will encourage your readers to stay on your blog much longer by providing enticing links to your other content that may be of interest to them.
1. Link to your related posts:
Linking to posts on similar topics can help your readers to find extra content that may be of interest to them. Also, it can also improve the number of internal links in your blog posts. You can manually create related links at the end of your posts, or you can use a plugin to do it for you. I use the plugin, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
2. Use text links throughout posts:
As your writing your blog posts keep an open eye for opportunities to link to older posts. If you have text that relates to the topic of an older post, create a link. As you build more content this will become even easier to do. It’s also a good idea to periodically go back through some of your older posts to look for linking opportunities to more recent posts that did not exist at the first time of publishing, and add links to them.
3. Use a Site-map:
Site-maps are not only important for helping visitors find what they’re looking for, but they’re also an easy way to increase the amount of your internal links. I’m not talking about XML site-maps created for search engines (although they can be important too), but rather a site-map for your readers with links to all of your posts, or a Hot Topics page like I use, with links to your most important post, latest post, new post, you get the idea.
You can search WordPress.org, for a list of Site-map Generator Plugins, to automatically create a site-map for your blog.
4. Include links to your most popular posts on your sidebar:
Many blogs contain links to specific posts in the sidebar. Linking to your most popular post is a good way to increase your page views and also to improve your internal linking. This also can either be done manually or with the use of a plugin. The theme I’m using, came with a widget that does this for me.
5. Create a FAQ;
The use of Frequently Asked Questions pages (FAQ’s) can help you to get internal links to your posts while using highly targeted keywords and phrases. Just create some common questions your readers might have, that can be answered by your blog posts. Pose the question on the FAQ page and partially answer the question and give a link to a particular post for more information. When phrasing the questions, it’s a best practice to use keywords that readers are likely to use when doing a search, as this can help to improve traffic from search engines (on page SEO). Also using your keywords in the anchor text of the links, within your post, is a good practice to get into.
6. Write a series of posts:
One easy way of building up the number of internal links going from one post to another is to write a series of post. As the series is written and published each post can link to the other post. If you have a very long post, consider breaking that post into a series. You need to be careful with this method, and not over do it. or your readers may start to feel like you are using them to gain page views only.
7. Place links on your 404 pages:
Error pages are frustrating to visitors and are to be avoided as much as possible. But you can help make your 404 error pages more-user friendly and at the same time, help drive a little bit of extra traffic to some of most important posts. Most WordPress themes include a 404.php file that can be edited to include any content you want, including links.
As you can see, having a link strategy is helpful in many ways, and is very easy to do.
Until next time,
PS. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.