Linking to your internal blog posts is one of the most important aspects of building a successful blog. TechThinker commented on my blog traffic post:
I love the way you interlink all your blog posts. Your posts always remind me of the importance of doing Internal links.
Why are blog internal links important?
First of all it is a great service for your readers to introduce them to an article that has more detailed information about a topic you mention. It increases your page views, improves the user-experience of your visitors and introduces them to some of your older blog posts.
Blog internal links are also important for your search engine optimization. Same way that your visitors discover older posts via internal links, same way you show search engines which content of yours is worth crawling and indexing in their search results.
Internal linking and anchor text
I got this email from reader Anton recently:
Hey Marko, thanks for such good info here. Just had to ask a quick question. I haven’t seen many others do this but you do. I noticed you’re using anchor text and a link to
1.Marko Saric
2.blog consulting
3.Twitter Marketing Ebook.Why did you do that? Is that for SEO?
I know anchor text is super important when you’re getting link to your site. But is it important to use when you’re linking to your own pages?
Thanks so much, I hope you’ll find couple of minutes from your busy schedule to answer my question.
Anchor text is that clickable text in your hyperlinks. It basically tells both your visitors and search engines what the page you are linking to is about. Anchor text is very important for all links including internal links.
As you cannot really control what anchor text other blogs link to you, you can at least make sure that you use the important keywords that you want to rank for in your own internal linking. For example if you have a fashion blog make sure to use keyword phrases like fashion advice.
Read more on keywords: 7 steps to increase traffic and revenue via keyword research
Link also from older posts to new posts
Most bloggers only internal link to their older posts from their new posts. You can also do it the other way around.
If you have a good, older post that is relevant to something you have written more about lately, go back and edit the old one and include a link back to the new post. This is a great way of sending some page rank juice back to your new post to help it rank better.
Use for example one of the page rank checkers. This one will give you your Google PR for all the pages on your site and will allow you to see which of your pages have good page rank to give away from.
Another way is to use WordPress plugin called Insights. It is placed just below your post writing field and lets you search for keywords that you are writing about and easily discovers nice pages to link to and also nice pages to link from.
Think internal linking when writing your next blog post
Internal linking is the easiest way to help build a successful blog, increase your page views, improve the user experience and at the same time also help your blog rank better in search engines.
Next post you are writing, take some time and create a couple of good internal links to your older posts but also go back and link to that new post from some of your relevant old articles.
Image by SantaRosa.
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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Quick question Marko, does the related posts plug in and any widgets you have in the sidebar (most popular, recently commented, etc) have any effect on SEO? I know on my site they do help to retain visitors, but I was wondering if they gave a little SEO boost as well.
And thanks for the reminder! I do have a few older posts that would benefit form being linked to newer posts!
Thanks Tracy. Site wide links like all those in the sidebars or those in the footer are not very valuable for SEO I think, but related posts are supposed to be very good as they are part of the content.
Thanks Marko, I installed it and will play around with it a little! And I guess inserting the links from older posts to new ones will have to wait til the weekend!
Marko – great reminder about the importance and power of building your reader’s knowledge through highlighting older posts. Not only does your keyword seo get better, but your posts become so much better when you have additional resources to help the reader understand the basics that get you to your current ideas.
Definitely Seth, it is very good to create the overview of your posts to your visitors. Most bloggers don’t do it much and some very relevant posts get lost in the archives instead of being very prominent to the readers.
Hey Marko,
Thanks for sharing. I did some interlinking, but I think you just pushed me to do it more extensively, especially going through my older blog posts and linking them to the new ones! I tried to install the “related posts” plugin, but somehow, it did not work. I think I will go dig deeper and have another look! Thanks for bringing this topic up!
That’s strange Maria, I use YARPP plugin and never had any problems with it. Try that one.
Internal links is very important for gp but i m putting labels on my blog content not a old now i no how to put internal links on my blog..! thanks marko saric
INLINKS that is Internal links, not only increase page views but overall content support.
Very Nicely explained, Marco. I like the way you do that of coarse using the internal links
Hi Marko, Internal Linking can also project one as a Authority in a given topic. When readers see that you have addressed similar topics in the past, they value what you have to say.
Thanks for mentioning my blog.
Cheers.
Aaron
I do a lot of internal linking, but I have to say that I haven’t noticed a heck of a lot of benefits from it. Still, I’m going to continue doing it, and hope that things open up for the blog one of these days.
Hi Marko,
Good insights. I need to go back and work on some of my older posts and this was a good reminder. I’ve been more focused on linking newer posts back to older ones.
Do you think that having more internal links in a post helps in dealing with Scrapers grabbing an entire post verbatim and posting it on another site? At the least you may get some backlinks from the Scraper site?
It’s definitely better as you will have links back to your blog so even if someone is reading that scraper site has a larger chance of finding out that you are the author.
good topic, everytime when there are related keyword to older post, i will make sure I link it, and sometime I even link it to outer source.. so my reader can get more information..
Linking to internally blog posts is important. It a hard lesson learned. I started doing so a months ago and page views has increased.
I love the way you explained it. I am a new visitor here and want to say I totally love this article. Hope to get learn more from you.
Agreed. Internal links ensures that your website gets properly indexed and that all pages are found by the search engines. It also builds the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase and enables users to navigate freely and effortlessly through your site finding the information they are interested in. Given these benefits this technique is worth a try. I have just realized its benefits lately and I guess it’s not yet too late to for me.
The internal linking is important and very useful:
- For me, it is very useful in writing the article that has inter relatiom with my previous and older one.By this system I can do my writing faster.
- For the visitor, it would make them convenience to read my article, it will be easier for them to relate it with detailed or related data in all of my article.
- All previous and older post discovered by visitors will be indexed by my SEO.
Hi Marko,
Good insights. I need to go back and work on some of my older posts and this was a good reminder. I’ve been more focused on linking newer posts back to older ones.
Do you think that having more internal links in a post helps in dealing with Scrapers grabbing an entire post verbatim and posting it on another site? At the least you may get some backlinks from the Scraper site?
I wouldn’t really count on those back links bringing any search engine value, but they might at least help the readers of the scraper blog know who the real person behind the article is.
I have been trying to do a better job with Interlinking. I just installed this new plugin and will definitely give it a try.