Using internal linking to improve the traffic to your site

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When you write a blog post it is beneficial for you to link back to older, related posts on a regular basis. This is called interlinking. Your blog is in your control, which means that you control your internal linking structure.

The search engines rank pages based on how many other pages link to it. I hope you noticed that I said PAGES, not SITES. When you link from one post to another, you are effectively helping each blog post earn better rankings, which will help you get more traffic.

This does NOT mean that you should link from each blog post to all your posts. If there are too many links on a page, it will reduce the power of all of them, which means that you are hurting your chances to rank high, rather than helping. And making your readers go through hundreds of links to find what they are looking for is not going to make them happy either.

But it does make sense to have some well placed links back to older blog posts. In this post, for example, it makes sense to link back to a post I did in August of last year, titled ‘Unlimited Traffic From One-Way Links In Your Menu’. Another benefit of doing this is that you can let the search engines know that their are multiple keywords that are relevant for this post.

Besides adding one-way backlinks this way, you may also increase your page views. After all, you are pointing out more relevant information, that your reader may have missed had you not mentioned it. To help prevent this further, you should have a sitemap on your blog. This may sound technical, but it is very simple to do if you have a wordpress blog. All you have to do is install the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin.

There are several other ways to make it easy for your readers to find other posts and create more internal one-way backlinks at the same time. Some people display a variety of posts on their home page. To be honest with you, I don’t like this way of displaying posts. With this layout it is very difficult to figure out how old the post is and it is not obvious what the most recent post is. Some will add a list of recent posts in the sidebar and this certainly helps, but I like the standard format of a blog, with the most recent post on the top.

What you can do, however, is add relevant other blog posts at the bottom of your post. A great plugin that will automatically do this for you is the ‘Yet Another Related Posts‘ plugin. The reason I like this plugin is the fact that you can define relevancy to your liking. So, if you want the plugin to only look at blog titles you can do that, but you can also have it look at categories, tags and even the entire post content. It will either the top posts it finds, or you can set it so that it only shows posts that are relevant based on your settings. So, if no posts qualifies, none are shown.

Another option to create more internal one-way backlinks is to display a link to the previous post and if it is an older post it can show links to both the next and previous posts. My theme has it automatically build in, but there are also plugins that can do this for you, if your theme does not have it build in. Just type in “previous post” on the Add-New plugin page and you will see multiple options to choose from. Since I have no experience using any of these I cannot give you a recommendation. But if you follow the star ratings you should be fine.

I have given you several examples of easy to use ways to create effective internal one-way backlinks. So, make sure that you don’t just read this post and agree that internal linking is important. Take action! Make it a part of your routine. Don’t worry too much about the keywords to use. If you use the title of the blog post, and you have done your homework in the past, than the anchor text will be relevant to your new post anyway.