By simply linking from one blog post to others in your blog you can massively increase your blog site traffic. A task that tasks just a few seconds can produce excellent results. What do you need to know?
As a blog owner, one of your concerns will be about increasing readership of your blog. You want new readers coming over to your website, and you want them reading more pages than they currently are. One on of the easiest ways of doing this is by steering them around your website as they read posts and to do this you can employ internal links.
These are exactly what they are called – links to pages on your website (hence internal) as opposed to links on other websites, which would be ‘external’. What are the purposes of these links?
Table of Contents
1 – Steer readers around your blog
As you are writing a new post think about previous posts and if any of them are relevant to what you are writing. You may be writing a post that mentions a subject in the overview, which you have already blogged about in detail. As this is a more detailed view of what you are writing about it makes sense that it could also be of interest to readers, so link to the post.
Once your blog post is live there’s also no harm in reviewing old posts and linking to the new post. This doesn’t have the same benefits as links from the latest post, but it does help to keep the blog looking up to date and fresh.
Doing this will also help improve your page views and keep your audience for an extended period on your site. This improves your bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that leave your site without clicking anything. Ideally, you would want visitors to convert by clicking on a link, signing up, or making a purchase. Linking your current posts to past informative and high-quality content will make readers stay on your site and increases the probability that they will share your post on social media.
2 – Search Engine Optimisation
When you publish a new post it (normally!) goes to the home page of your blog and sits there for a few days. Most blogging tools will also ‘ping’ the major search engines so that they know there is a new post to visit.
This means that recent posts are highly visible to the search engines, but the old ones get a bit ‘forgotten’. By linking your newest work to older pieces, you are pointing the search engines straight into the archives. This helps to ‘distribute’ link to favour of your website.
Occasional, and I do more occasional and not frequent, usage of keywords and keyword phrases in these links might also help very slightly in your SEO processes.
If you need help with this kind of strategy, white label SEO can help you. They have the expertise and credentials that have worked for many companies, and they will definitely work for you. They have helped grow small blogs to have thousands of followers with their effective, smart, and updated tactics.
3 – Revenge to content theft
This might seem a strange ‘benefit’ but it is a trick that I have successfully exploited in the past when my blog content was routinely being stolen. The technique that these people use is to download your blog content via your RSS feed and publish it to their own blogs. Recently with Google updates punishing duplicate content, this is not such a massive problem, but if it happens then this technique can make sure that you do see some benefits!
If you are adding internal links to your posts then if someone copies your content to their site then these become external links from their site to yours. You might get some SEO advantage (unlikely as Google is punishing such sites), whilst any readers the stealing site does get will at least see links into your site. However, with all of your posts pointing back to your own website, it’s a huge hint to Google as to the fact that it was your site that was the original source of the content!
This strategy proves to be very beneficial as the content crawls back to you if any of the thief’s audience clicks on the link. This is also useful in indexing your site.
How to employ this linking?
There are various plugins that you can use to list related posts, but I prefer the simple approach of manually adding links within the post to other posts. This way, the links are right where the reader is reading and ready for them to click on. Don’t try to be clever in terms of search engine optimization. You don’t need to pack every one of these links with keywords. Go the other way and just make them natural and fit into the context of the page. If “click here for more information” fits the best then use that. All that matters is that readers, and search engines, can start to follow the spiders’ web of links you are leaving and quickly find your important posts.
You may also just use related words that wouldn’t be longer than four words since that is the ideal parameter in linking. It would also work better if you’re linking a post that’s relatively new because an extremely old post may not be as relevant anymore. All the more reason that you should be updating your blog with new and fresh content at all times.
