6 Simple Ways to Improve Internal Blog Linkings

It is important to have a good internal linking strategy is important for a few reasons:
a) It helps to increase page views and encourage readers to stay on your blog longer by providing attractive links to content that may interest them.
b) It helps to improve the search engine rankings for your posts.

Ok now let’s look at the 6 simple ways to improve the internal linking throughout your blog. Remember you need to put these into action and you’ll be well on your way to creating a more user-friendly blog along with improving your search engine rankings.

1. Link to related posts
Linking to posts on similar topics can help your readers to find additional content that may interest them. Just as importantly, it can also improve the number of internal links to 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. WordPress users can download the Related Entries plugin.

2. Use a sitemap
Sitemaps 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 internal links to your important pages. I’m not talking about XML sitemaps created for search engines (although they can be important too), but rather a sitemap for your readers with links to all of your posts, or at least your most important ones.

WordPress users can use the Sitemap Generator Plugin from Dago Design to automatically create a sitemap for their blog. This plugin creates a helpful sitemap page with links to your posts arranged by category.

3. 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 relates to the topic of an older post, create a link. As you build more and more content this will be even easier. 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 initial time of publishing.

4. Include links to most popular posts on your sidebar
Linking to the most popular post in your blog is a good way to increase your page views and also to improve your internal link strength. This also can either be done manually or with the use of a plugin. Doing it manually will require updates and changes whenever you want to feature new posts, whereas a plugin like MostWanted will eliminate the manual effort.

5. 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. As the series is written and published each post can link to the others. If you have a very long post, consider breaking it into a series. Be careful not to do this all the time as your readers may start to feel like you are using them to gain page views.

6. The aLinks plugin for WordPress
WordPress users can take advantage of the aLinks plugin to automatically create links for commonly used phrases throughout their blog posts. The plugin is designed for use with internal links as well as external links.

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Tagged as: Blogs, Linking, Posts