Most bloggers donโt 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, weโll discuss everything from the scratch to interlink like a pro. Without much ado lets get into the details.
Table of Contents
What is interlinking anyway?
In simple terms, linking to your own blog posts is called interlinking. Most new bloggers donโt do inter linking right, thus they canโt drive more traffic to their old posts. Theyโll bury them without boosting their search traffic to those old blog posts.
When youโre 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 theyโre 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 youโre linking to specific pages on your own blog.
- Can rank better for the desired keywords: always use โanchored textsโ 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 โtargeted anchor textsโ? 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, theyโll surely consider clicking on the internal links to read further. This way you can get more page views and thus low bounce rate for your blog.
- Can make search engines crawl each & every page: search engine crawlers always love fresh content. When youโre often linking to your old blog posts, youโre making them to crawl each and every blog posts in your blog. This way you can bring more search traffic in the long run.
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 youโre 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.
Hereโs how it looks like;
Hereโs 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 youโre 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)
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.
Itโs 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 youโll certainly manage to interlink better when youโre practicing it more.
You must know your related posts to the current post youโre writing. This way youโll have more idea of what youโre 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
Thereโs 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, youโll 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 donโt like it.
If youโre 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, thereโs nothing new you can do as it works out of the box automatically and disables self pingbacks.
Alternatively, if you donโt 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 themeโs 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’ );
Thatโs it, youโre 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, โthe number of internal links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines about the relative importance of that pageโ. Thatโs why you should always include few internal links to other blog posts on your site which are relevant to the topic youโre covering.
Hereโs 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 itโs 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, โtiny dancing horseโ 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 โRead moreโ, โClick hereโ 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 โBloggersPassionโ).
- Partial match keyword links (includes specific keywords such as โWordPress SEO tipsโ linking to a page about WordPress SEO)
Pro tip: Itโs 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 youโre 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 siteโs 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 โsite:yourblogname.com category or keywordโ to find all the relevant blog posts on your blog about a particular topic.
Hereโs an example.
As you can see above, we used our siteโs example to find all the relevant blog posts under SEO. You can start using any of them while doing internal linking. Itโs 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 youโre 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 โlinkโ option after selecting an anchor text (in the above example โSee Belowโ is the anchor text), it shows you a box where you can insert various keywords to find relevant posts to add the link. Thatโs it, youโre done.
Use Silos concept
Use silos concept while linking to your older blog posts. If youโre 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, letโs say youโve 3 categories on your blog including affiliate marketing, SEO, web hosting and if youโre 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.
Most of the authority sites open their interlinks in the same tab while few bloggers prefer opening them in new tabs. At Bloggers Passion, we open all of our links (including internal and external links) in new tabs. The reason is to provide better reading experience for our target audience.
Internal links have 2 major benefits: it helps you with better user reading experience and also passes link juice so you get additional SEO benefits.
But when it comes to pleasing users and search engines, always prefer people. Donโt add an internal link just for the sake of it. Only do it if it adds value to whatever the content your website audience are reading.
Thereโs no rule. Actually, there used to be a rule of not using more than 100 links on a page in the Google guidelines but they have removed it now, so you can use as many as you want.
Yes, you can publish a post or page without including any internal links whatsoever. No issues with that. But if you really want to pass link juice to other internal pages on your site which are relevant to the topic youโre covering, you should use internal links.
BIG NO, Donโt use nofollow tags on your internal links as you should let link juice flow freely throughout your website for better rankings.
A nofollow tag is used when you donโt want search engine crawlers to count the link juice flowing through a specific web page (in such case, you can use rel=โnofollowโ attribute on your link tag).
Quick note: You can add a nofollow on the links to your feed such as RSS feeds, because itโs not really helpful to have RSS feeds in web search results.
Final Thoughts
Internal links are extremely crucial if you want to boost your websiteโs SEO in 2024 and beyond. If youโre publishing new blog posts without including internal links to other posts on your site, youโre 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.
I’ve been following Bloggerpassion for a long time now these posts are something people usually ignore but are super important and I’ve learned a lot from this blog post as well.
My question is should we add a CATAGORY or mildly related post or even outbound link that is related to our post but in no way a source of inspiration to our blog post in interlinking? as my blog is new and there are no more than 20 posts and counting.
Should I interlink a single post multiple times as in different posts??
Also, what plugin do you use for FAQ?
Hari, you can link to your posts from multiple posts. Avoid linking to the same post multiple times from the same content. We are showing faqs via Rank Math plugin. Thanks
Hi Anil,
Thanks for the nice article.
I was wondering whether to create pillar content or various small posts & connect them together?
Any thoughts on this?
Thanks for your time.
Informative post about interlinks. Usually, I link posts using anchor texts, full post titles, and related post links. Different types of linking will help you to improve page views and reduce bounce rates.
Yoast SEO is a prominent plugin to optimize pages for search engines as well as social media. You can also consider Rank Math to do the same job including internal link suggestions.
All the best,
sir plz How to create automatic internal links in blogger websites blogs post
I found really cool ways to interlink my articles. Especially thanks for knowing us the name of WordPress plugin which makes inter linking super fast.
Great Article about interlinking. i know interlinking is essential but it is major problem for every blogger.
Hope WP insight plugin solved this problem. thanks for plugin suggestion.
can you tell me your views on seo smart link plugin.
Best.
If we use Internal Linking of blog post what is the main benefit . Will it be benefited in SEO or Just increase the page views
Surely interlinking is going to help you in multiple ways which includes the seo benefits as well. Internal linking is also considered a great way to build lots of quality links for our targeted terms.
Great tips. I tried SEO smart link and it’s quite simple to manage, in few minutes, you can link a lot of you top articles or pages. This means more page views and probably, more conversions!
I suggest to use this plugin!
Wp plugin is the best method for interlinking in WordPress blogs .Thanks for the information regarding the interlinking to get more pageviews.
I was not aware that there was a plugin that can do this for me, does it automatically do it by the keywords you put in?
Interlinking helps a lot in to reduce bounce rate, increase page rank.
If you like your Pages like this
Page 1 >>>>>> Page 2
Page 2 >>>>>> Page 3
Page 3 >>>>>> Page 1
Then you will get the maximum advantage from Interlinking…
Thanks
Hi Nishant,
Isn’t is like a creating link wheel from our posts ?
Hi Nishant,
Great to see you here! Yes, that’s REALLY a great strategy to interlink to older posts buddy.
Thanks so much for the additional tip ๐
Which is the best seo plugin among these three and any problem with shared hosting plan if i install on my blog ?
SEO smart links is the best one among them (as far as I know). NO there won’t be any problem with them ๐
Nice post Anil. Most of time I try to interlink my posts. :-). And I like to reduce bounce rate. Interlinking is very helpful for do that. ๐
Great post. I love industry posts that discuss more psychological aspects, so I loved reading about the two types of disinhibition.
Hi Raplus, glad you liked it.
Interlinking is always a great strategy to bring more traffic to old your blog posts, as well as passing quality link juices to other pages.
Thanks for the comment.