How to Interlink Your Blog Posts Like a PRO in 2024

Most bloggers don’t realise the importance of interlinking. It is extremely important to rank better in Google search results.

In this Google Panda world, you must be focusing on targeting the right keywords to interlink the professional way and reap the rewards from the search engines.

In this article, we’ll discuss everything from the scratch to interlink like a pro. Without much ado lets get into the details.

What is interlinking anyway?

In simple terms, linking to your own blog posts is called interlinking. Most new bloggers don’t do inter linking right, thus they can’t drive more traffic to their old posts. They’ll bury them without boosting their search traffic to those old blog posts.

When you’re internal linking the right way- you can bring more search traffic to your related keywords and can make a better impact on the readers too. Because most readers will love reading additional references when they’re searching for something.

How to Interlink Your Blog Posts for Better Results

Why should you consider interlinking to your posts?

Before we dive into the details of how to use internal links on your blog, let’s first talk about its benefits.

Internal linking can help you with the following things:

• Bring you more traffic from search engines: you can certainly drive more traffic from the search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing etc when you’re linking to specific pages on your own blog.
• Can rank better for the desired keywords: always use ‘anchored texts’ on your internal links to rank high for your desired keywords. Do you know that you can rank higher in the search engine results for those keywords which are linked with the ‘targeted anchor texts’? Yes.. you can make use of anchor texts within your links to get more results for your targeted keywords.
• Can pass link juice to old posts: next time when the domain authority (DA) updates rolls out, check out your own blog posts, the pages which are linked more often will get a high DA. You can also read our post on increasing your website’s DA score.
• Can increase page views: no doubt, you can bring more page views from it. When people find reading your articles interesting, they’ll surely consider clicking on the internal links to read further. This way you can get more page views and thus low bounce rates for your blog.
• Can make search engines crawl each & every page: search engine crawlers always love fresh content. When you’re often linking to your old blog posts, you’re making them to crawl each and every blog posts in your blog. This way you can bring more search traffic in the long run.

Learn How to Start Your OWN BLOG & Start Making Money (WORTH $197)

Here are the top ways for internal linking like a pro

1. Put your links in the beginning of the articles

Do you know the ONE simple secret to rank better in the search engines from your links? That is.. using the links in the beginning of the post! Yes, search engine crawlers will love those links which are right under the meta description and head tags i.e. the beginning of your article.

When you want to rank high for the desired keywords.. make use of this simple tactic to rank high. Always interlink the relevant posts in the beginning of your article.

2. Use WordPress plugins

If you’re looking for few best WordPress plugins for inserting internal links smartly into your blog posts, here are few interlinking plugins for you.

Top 3 Best WordPress Plugins to Use in 2024

1. Premium WordPress SEO By Yoast: WordPress SEO by Yoast is the #1 SEO plugin used by millions of people worldwide for optimizing their posts. It also has a premium version which offers an incredible feature called internal linking suggestions.

It helps you easily pick related links to other posts. Just start typing and the internal link suggestions will appear. You can also copy links or drag and drop them into your blog post without having to leave your WordPress editor.

Here’s how it looks like;

Here’s how it works: once your article is done, Yoast premium plugin analyse your content, picks few prominent keywords and offers you highly relevant internal link suggestions that you can use within your article.

Read our premium vs free SEO Yoast to know more about the comparison of both along with all the features and pricing options.

2. Internal Link Building: If you’re looking for a free WordPress plugin for internal linking to your blog posts, you should try this plugin. It lets you assign keywords to given destination URLs so you can easily link to your old blog posts.

Besides internal linking, this plugin also helps you make links nofollow (useful when you link to affiliate products or social media sites) along with the option to upload keywords in bulk.

3. Interlinks Manager: If you want to have access to a plugin which is exclusive for internal links, this plugin is just for you. This is a premium plugin from CodeCanyon which costs you $33 which offers you exceptional features including;

• Automatic internal linking suggestions
• Calculates the link juice
• The ability to add internal links automatically
• The ability to track your internal links (you can see how many people clicked on your links and so on)

3. Make use of related posts

You can also use related blog posts on your blog to better link to your old posts. One thing you should consider here is the relevancy of posts you are linking to.

It’s not a big deal to link like a pro, but it does take some practice. In the beginning you may find it bit hard to link to your old blog posts, but you’ll certainly manage to interlink better when you’re practicing it more.

You must know your related posts to the current post you’re writing. This way you’ll have more idea of what you’re talking about and you can easily create better links for each and every post.

3 Important Things to Remember:

Here are few of the most important things to remember while linking your blog posts in 2024.

1. Disable Self Pingbacks In WordPress

There’s a common issue while interlinking your blog posts in WordPress which is self pingbacks.

It simply means that, whenever you link to your old blog posts, it creates a self pingback which usually shows up in the comment section of the particular post.

So whenever you do interlinking on your blog, you’ll get a new comment in the comments section which appears to be the post link as a new comment. These are known as self pingbacks.

They completely clutter up your comment section and most people don’t like it.

If you’re also one among them who hates to see self pingbacks while linking, you can install a WordPress plugin called No Self Pings.

The plugin is completely free to use and once you install and activate the plugin, there’s nothing new you can do as it works out of the box automatically and disables self pingbacks.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to use an extra plugin to disable self pings, you can insert the following code. Copy and paste the following code in your WordPress theme’s functions.php file to disable self pingbacks.

function no_self_ping( &$links ) {

$home = get_option( ‘home’ );

foreach ( $links as $l => $link )

if ( 0 === strpos( $link, $home ) )

unset($links[$l]);

}

add_action( ‘pre_ping’, ‘no_self_ping’ );

That’s it, you’re done. You will no longer get self pingbacks while interlinking blog posts in WordPress, that too without using a plugin.

2. The Importance of Anchor Text

Google states that, “the number of internal links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines about the relative importance of that page”. That’s why you should always include few internal links to other blog posts on your site which are relevant to the topic you’re covering.

Here’s where the importance of anchor text also comes into play. The anchor text is the visible and clickable text in a hyperlink and the anchor text can literally determine the ranking of the page where it’s linking to.

Google also looks at the anchor text of internal links to better understand the context of your blog post or page.

In simple terms, anchor text helps both search engines and users relevant contextual information about the content of the link.

Have a look at the following illustration.

In the above example, “tiny dancing horse” is the anchor text for the link.

There are several types of anchor texts including;

• Naked links (such as bloggerspassion.com)
• Generic links (such as “Read more”, “Click here” and so on)
• Image links (whenever an image is linked within your blog, Google will use the text contained in the image’s ALT tag as the anchor text)
• Branded links (BloggersPassion linking to an article on the BloggersPassion blog with the anchor text “BloggersPassion”).
• Partial match keyword links (includes specific keywords such as “WordPress SEO tips” linking to a page about WordPress SEO)

Pro tip: It’s always better to use a partial match keyword rich link while interlinking to your older blog posts. Just make sure to use a partial match primary keyword which is relevant to the target page that you’re linking.

3. Interlinking Best Practices

Smart linking is a skill which can be improved with practice. Here are few best practices you can use to improve your site’s SEO by also providing a great experience to your users.

Use Google Search:

There are a ton of incredible Google tricks and tips you can use to better link to your older relevant posts on your blog.

You can simply use a search string on Google like “site:yourblogname.com category or keyword” to find all the relevant blog posts on your blog about a particular topic.

Here’s an example.

As you can see above, we used our site’s example to find all the relevant blog posts under SEO. You can start using any of them while doing internal linking. It’s fast, easy and free!

Use WordPress default insert link

The great thing about using WordPress is that it gives you a ton of the incredible features out of the box including a default insert link to add relevant internal links to your old blog posts.

If you’re wondering about how you can use WordPress to add internal links easily, check out this illustration.

As you can see above, simply click on the “link” option after selecting an anchor text (in the above example “See Below” is the anchor text), it shows you a box where you can insert various keywords to find relevant posts to add the link. That’s it, you’re done.

Use Silos concept

Use silos concept while linking to your older blog posts. If you’re wondering about what silos are and how they can help you with SEO, you can read this detailed post on Silos for SEO to know more in detail.

The concept here is to find and link to relevant posts from the same category.

For instance, let’s say you’ve 3 categories on your blog including affiliate marketing, SEO, web hosting and if you’re writing a blog post around SEO, make sure to include internal links related to that particular category (silo) for better crawlability and user experience.

Browse more Blogging Resources:

• How to Start a Blog in 2024 [Step by Step Process]
• How to Get Your Blog Noticed in 2024
• A Powerful Blog Setup Checklist
• How to Promote Your Blog for Free in 2024
• What is Personal Branding with Personal Brand Examples in 2024

FAQs About Internal Linking

Here are few important questions around interlinking blog posts in WordPress that you might want to know for better understanding.

Quick note: You can add a nofollow on the links to your feed such as RSS feeds, because it’s not really helpful to have RSS feeds in web search results.

Final Thoughts

Internal links are extremely crucial if you want to boost your website’s SEO in 2024 and beyond. If you’re publishing new blog posts without including internal links to other posts on your site, you’re doing a huge mistake.

Not only interlinking helps you pass link juice to other pages but it also helps with better crawlability and user engagement on your site.