» March 18, 2008 in
Internal linking is creating links to content on the domain where the link originates. Basically it means linking to yourself.
Why Link To Yourself?
1. For people
First and foremost, to help your visitors find your content. If you have a page about underwear, and you mention the word underwear in another post, changing it to a link to your main underwear page helps visitors find you content easier.
2. For Robots
Search engine robots like to follow links to get to pages and also value pages based on how many links they have pointing at them, even from your own domain. Give the bots the easiest way to crawl your site, link to your own content often.
An Easy Way To Do Internal Linking
Many people are familiar with a plugin for wordpress that changes specific words to affilaite links. Well you can use similar plugins to link internally on your site.
Instead of sending your visitors to affiliate sites, send them deeper into your own site.
My favorite is Wordpress Alinks.
I'm terrible with remembering to link to my own content from within my posts. With Alinks I set up a word/link pair and the plugin does it for me.
For instance, I can go into Alinks and tell it "every time I mention underwear please change that word to a link to my underwear page". And that's it. You can do this over and over for keyword/link pairs and Alinks does the rest.
Internal Linking 101
Remember to link to yourself. It's easy and helps. And if you forget like me check out a solution like Wordpress Alinks.
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Mark from Bloglyne says on March 19, 2008
About a year ago everybody was saying that you needed to be careful, especially in WordPress not to list an article in more than one category because it could cause the article to be listed in more than one place and then the almighty Google Spider may index the page as duplicate content... any risk of that here?
I think it is a good tip, because you are still talking about just having the link go to the one page and you don't have the page listed twice, right?
Caroline Middlebrook says on March 19, 2008
If this is something that you tend to forget about a lot, a lazy way to do it would be to use a 'related posts' plugin. This will pick a set number of posts (you specify how many) and will link to them at the end of each post you write. Once your blog has a good number of posts this can really add to the number of internal links you have.
Simonne says on March 19, 2008
I'm using Alinks on some of my blogs and it really does a great job. Not only that internal linking is much easier, but also it can be used to automatically insert Amazon links in articles, on the keywords I specify.
Lernen says on March 19, 2008
Hi,
I am not sure how it works in America or Canada. Here in Europe (Germany) i use google Blog-Search-PING. Wit this ping my new post appear within 10-20 Minutes not only on Blog-Search from Google but allso on Google main search page. So i strongly recommend you to use google blog-search-ping.
Your recomendation for internal linking is realy greate. hopfuly Sixpart will make plugins like this for Movable Type. (that I am using) :)
Making Money Online says on March 19, 2008
Wow, thanks for the great info!
digitalnomad says on March 19, 2008
I thought you disliked wordpress as a platform.
45n5 () says on March 19, 2008:
thanks all for the great suggestions, related links is a killer idea also ;)@digital - I modify the alinks for my own use, I still don't use wordpress but most people do
Iphone Blogger says on March 19, 2008
Thanks for that information. I thing this is a great SEO tip for bloggers like me
Iphone Blogger says on March 19, 2008
I hope the googlebot will not see this as spamming. I am scared!
How will Search Engine bots see this you new tip
Vlad says on March 19, 2008
Mark are you switching to WordPress??? ;)
I tried aLinks for internal linking but do not really like it. But I love what it does for linking out.
I prefer Related Posts plugins because the links usually contain the entire title of the article. Generally these plugins by default show 5 related posts. You can change that settings but I always leave it at 5. If you write 5 posts per week you end up with 25 internal links per week. Over the period of time this can actually amount to considerable amount of internal links....
But all this talk very SEOee lol.... there is the word. But in a good sense.
BTW I use semiologic package on my blog for related posts.
wisdom says on March 19, 2008
Thanks for the heads up. I'm going to have to check out aLinks.
eBay Business says on March 22, 2008
Thanks a lot for this information. I always thought that it was only important to build just one way links to your website. I hope this will get me indexed faster on google and other search engines. Thanks again.
Sapphire says on March 24, 2008
Alinks rocks, but I hate that it puts a lot of code above your content in source view. Or am I the only one who doesn't know how to fix that?
Kyle James says on March 24, 2008
Great tip Mark... but underwear? You have to come up with a better example than this next time. :)
45n5 says on March 24, 2008
thanks all
@sapphire - I've never used alinks with wordpress, only a homegrown modification so i can't help you but hopefully someone else that stops by might.
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