So, let me start with SEO is not dead but it has become more competitive and challenging. Apart from all the usual SEO checklist and things which we do, SEO in 2012 and beyond is all about User engagement and making your site social. If you have been writing amazing content but failed to create a community and a brand around your blog, coming days are going to be hard for you. Now, in this article I’m going to talk about benefits of adding interlink within your blog and 2 useful WordPress plugins, which will help you to do the task smartly.
Why should you Interlink your Blog posts ?
We all know about outbound link SEO and it’s help in boosting the quality of our site, but when it comes to our own site, we tend to take advantage of linking within our site.
Usually when your readers come from Search or from referral traffic, they don’t know much about your site and when they land on an awesome piece of content and you have smartly interlinked your article with relevant blog posts, it will make them browse more pages on your site and that helps the most to convert those one time traffic into subscriber. This is one advantage, another one is: When you link to your blog posts with proper anchor text, it helps search engine bots to understand your content better, improve internal link structure, make bots index and crawl more pages on your site and so on.
From my experience, a Website leveraging the power of Intrerlinking, helps search engine bots to effectively crawl deeper pages of your site and improve the ranking of internal and deeper pages. Here are some of the direct and indirect advantages of interlinking blog posts:
- Reduces bounce rate
- Increases user experience and avg. time on site
- Bots can crawl deep pages and helps in indexing
- Improve the ranking of internal pages, when you use anchor text for linking
These are just a few of the advantages which I can think of right now. If you know more, let me know via comment.
Ways to interlink Blog posts in WordPress
When you have a blog with over 1000 posts, it’s really hard to remember every one and link properly. Though, there are many plugins and also WordPress inbuilt feature which will help you to smartly add internal links. I’m skipping the default WordPress hyperlink feature for now, as it never amused me enough and I needed something more solid and concrete.
WordPress insights plugin:
Now, this is the first plugin that I highly recommend and suggest you use it. It’s a free WordPress plugin and it helps you quickly find blog posts within your blog or you can use Google search to find content from your blog or from others. This plugin adds a column called Insights in Post editor section and you can quickly search your blog for any Keyword and with one click you can link it to any word. Although, the best approach would be, using the Google search feature of this plugin, as it helps you find more relevant content on your blog.
I use the following terms to find content from my blog in Google search, using Insights plugin: Keyword Site:ShoutMeLoud.com
Simple and very effective. If you have not yet tried this plugin, you should go ahead and give it a shot.
SEO smart link plugin: Interlinking automation
This is another plugin which automates the process of linking. This plugin is developed by Vladimir, who is also the creator of awesome plugins like SEO friendly images, Managewp.com and many others. Using SEO smart link is easy, and all you need to do is:
Install and activate the plugin
Go to Setting of plugin and add your Keyword with Link you would like to authlink. For example, if you want to link word like FamousBloggers to https://famousbloggers.net/ every time, simply add
FamousBloggers, Famous Bloggers| https://famousbloggers.net/
Now, in future blog posts whenever you use the word Famousbloggers or Famous Bloggers, it will auto link to the link added in the setting section. They also have a premium version which comes with advance features like Caching, Add links in RSS feeds, add nofollow attributes and many more.
Download SEO smart link plugin
I find the Insights way more effective, as you can easily link to relevant article with long tail text, and it will make your linking more relevant and effective. If you need more useful SEO plugins after Panda world, you should check out: Life saver WordPress plugin for Google panda.
Well, that’s about me and I have seen a great difference in bounce rate when ever I inter-link my blog posts effectively and users stick to my blog for a longer period. I would love to know your strategy of interlinking your blog posts.
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