As we continue on with the second half of 31-Days to Kick Your Blog in the Butt, we are on Day-17 and I want to hit on another way to not only do you some good. But, also provide you with a way to get your readers to once again dig deeper into your blog.
We talk a lot about linking to other blogs when we discuss what we can do to get noticed and to provide information to our readers. We also discuss blogrolls (ick) and linking in general. The one practice which is one of the most overlooked and under used sources of links in our post – internal links to our own blog post. I am mainly talking about putting links to our own post inside our post.
Today’s teaching moment
Using internal linking or as some might call it, interlinking post, is something you can do even if your blog is relatively new. You can always find a way to connect one post to another from time to time. As your blog ages and you have posted more and more content, you will have more opportunities to link your new post to a post in your archives.
What you are trying to do is make your blog post and your blog more “sticky”. You are wanting to keep your readers on your blog and you want them to dig deeper into your blog’s content. And why not? If you are doing your blogging job right, you are providing good, up-to-date content your readers are asking for and can use.
Using internal links on a regular basis accomplishes some good benefits for you and your readers:
- they can decrease your bounce rate
- and increase your page views per visitor by sending your visitors to other pages
- you are providing more information to your readers and giving them more reasons to come back to your blog
- you are keeping your readers on your blog, reading your content
- internal links count in SEO
What about SEO and internal linking.
There is a great post over at SEOmoz called 17 ways search engines judge the value of a link. In that post they talk briefly about internal linking.
while internal links (links that point from one page on your site to another) do carry some weight; links from external sites matter far more.
While I agree with that statement, SEO is not the only benefit of using internal links. An important consideration, yes. The only consideration, no. The first four benefits mentioned above are listed before SEO because those are the key reasons to use internal linkage. Remember your purpose is to provide information to your readers. And getting them to dig deeper into your blog and making that process easier for them will win you points, make your blog more sticky and get you return visitors.
The how to on internal linking and some tools
There are a few WordPress plugins you can use to accomplish this. The one we use on this blog as far as putting links at the end of a post is Yet Another Related Post. Another is Insights WordPress Plugin.
While both of these are a great way to get relevant links to your new post, don’t use this method in place of putting some of those organic links to your own post in your new post. And when you do internal links in your post, make sure the words you use in the link are relevant keywords. In other words, you want the link to be both relevant and have keywords in it. This will benefit you to both the search engines and to your readers.
Your homework for today
As you are writing your next couple of blog post, I want you to search your blog and find some other relevant post you have written. Link back to these post, making sure you use relevant keywords in the link.
We are going to spend some time in the next few days talking about writing for the human search engine and not being so worried about Google.
