Most bloggers don’t realize the importance of interlinking. Interlinking your blog articles is important to rank your site better in the search engines and also to generate more traffic to your site.
What is interlinking?
Interlinking your blog posts means creating links from your new posts to your previous ones within the same website or blog. If you carefully study some popular blogs, you’ll be surprised to see how all the professional bloggers have tactfully interlinked their blog posts. When interlinking is done in the right way, it can easily enhance the overall quality of your blog. It can be appealing to both your visitors as well as search engines.
There are many more benefits of interlinking your WordPress blog posts. Some of the greatest benefits include:
- Boost your page rank
- Reduce your website bounce rate
- Increase the average total page views of your blog
- Get all your posts indexed by Google
- Generate more organic traffic
- Benefits readers in finding related posts easily and make them stay on your blog for longer time
Here are five easy tips to interlink your blog posts. Follow them and you’ll be on your way to designing a more user-friendly blog and also making your site rank better in search results.
1. Using free WordPress Plugins
There are many free WordPress plugins out there to help you interlinking your blog posts like a pro.
Insight plugin allows you to interlink your pages, images or videos with the help of its Ajax interface.
SEO Smart links is another effective plugin which automatically links keywords and phrases in your blog posts and comments with corresponding blog posts, categories, tabs and pages on your site.
2. Feature links at the beginning of your article
Just as important as the number of interlinks you have in your pages is the placement of your interlink or hyperlinked text.
Use some targeted keywords as the anchor text for interlinking posts on your blog.
Ideally, you can add your hyperlinked anchor texts anywhere on your blog post. Search engines love the first five links they notice on your page. Some suggest featuring your links in the initial section of your page so that it makes your search visibility better than those put in the last section of your post or in the footer. For improving your SEO rankings, it’s a good idea to add your links above the fold of your page. This means it helps your visitors to easily go through your interlinks before scrolling down.
Some blogs feature links to their popular posts in the sidebar. This is another way to increase page views as well as improve your internal link strength. You can either do this by yourself or do it with the help of a plugin. If you choose doing it manually then it requires regular updates and changes, whereas the use of a plugin like Most wanted will automate the process.
3. Avoid linking to the same post more than once in each article
This is an important point to be noted. In case you have 2 links pointing to the same URL, then search engines consider only the first hyperlinked text. From a reader’s point of you, you won’t be doing your page any favors. Being directed to the same post repeatedly will distract your readers rather than engaging them in your posts.
Also, it is not a good idea to over-interlink all of your blog posts in just one post. This only makes your post look like spamming and possibly stop visitors from visiting your site. Hence, if you want to interlink your other specific posts, you have to do it from another page.
4. Relevancy is important
It is important that the interlinking you do is relevant to the content of your page. Try to avoid irrelevant links into each post just because they all appear on your WordPress site. For example, if you have a new WordPress article about “Simple techniques to use interlinks” and you had previously written a post on “Tips on using anchor texts” then you could simply add the URL of this post in your new article as both the posts are related to the same topic.
Adding links of relevant posts get you adequate readership and if you feature irrelevant links in each of your blog posts, that’s only going to turn off your readers and have a bad impact on your page views.
5. Create a FAQ
Create some questions that readers may have in their mind and that can be answered in your articles. Put the question on the FAQ page and don’t answer it completely on the same page, answer it with a few words and direct the readers using a link to the relevant page for the complete answer. Also, use highly targeted keywords and phrases in your questions, as this helps to improve traffic from search engines.
That’s all about interlinking your articles easily and effectively.