The benefits of internal linking
Written by Kevin Muldoon from System0 on July 2, 2007
Regular readers of Blogging Tips will know that i link to older articles quite a lot in my posts. There are a lot of reasons why i do this :
- It saves me from duplicating what i have already wrote. It’s much easier to refer to a post i did about a certain subject than repeat myself again.
- It stops good posts from being lost in the archives. Sometimes good posts dont get a lot of comments when they are published but if you link back to your good posts on a regular basis you will give more exposure to those posts.
- It distrubutes your page rank throughout your blog. By linking to individual posts and pages you are sending page rank to them and increasing the chance of the page getting a higher PR.
It’s not just posts that you should be linking to other areas of your site. You should make sure that your sidebar links to the main areas of your site and it’s worth linking to your best posts from static pages too. A sitemap will also go a long way with the search engines to finding all your content.
It can be a pain trying to search through your old posts to find the correct URL to link to but it definately benefits your blog so i encourage you all to start getting into the habit of linking to your older posts and pages.
Good luck,
Kevin
Tom | July 2nd, 2007 at 5:15 am #
Heya Kevin, good post, I’m no grammar nazi but you missed this bit;
i have already wrote already
I agree with what you’re saying though, there’s no point letting valuable content sink into the background!
GoddessCarlie | July 2nd, 2007 at 6:08 am #
I probably do a bit of internal linking overboard. I love it and have links to my other pages everywhere
KC TAN | July 2nd, 2007 at 6:49 am #
One of the advantages for linking internally is it helps the readers to stay longer in your blog =)
This is a very effective strategy when combined with the ‘related post’ plug-in.
Good post, Kevin!
Joey | July 2nd, 2007 at 7:16 am #
That is a good tip. I also find it helps to link to your contact form in your posts to help encourage readers to converse with you.
Ramkarthik | July 2nd, 2007 at 9:18 am #
Yeah Kevin. Totally agree with you. You also have another plus point if you do so. Your readers will take their time to read those articles if the heading/article catches their mind. You will have your visitors also for a longer time in your blog.
OUCH | July 2nd, 2007 at 10:37 am #
The internal links also point to Google on which pages are more important to you.
cmanlong | July 2nd, 2007 at 1:53 pm #
i just wrote a post about this very subject a couple of days ago but from a slightly different perspective. Mine was more of an instructional post about they best way to format the link, etc…
I like your angle and have linked to your article from my post. thanks again for the great article.
i don’t know if you allow html in your comments but if so here is the link for my post if not mod it out.
http://cmansmoneypages.blogspot.com/2007/06/internal-links-and-their-affect-on.html
later all and have a profitable and productive blogging day
cmanlong | July 2nd, 2007 at 1:57 pm #
where can i get the related posts plugin?? If there is one that will work for blogger.
later all and have a profitable and productive blogging day
Sly | July 3rd, 2007 at 1:17 pm #
All those points are very important. To answer cmanlong’s question, you don’t really need that plug-in to link back to your other posts. You can make posts called “Top posts of the week” or something. Then just add the links manually.
Robb | July 4th, 2007 at 2:24 pm #
Aaah, the value of internal linking. Definitely something I’ve overlooked.. repeatedly. Thanks for the nudge
cmanlong | July 6th, 2007 at 11:24 am #
i am trying to avoid doing related posts/top posts manually as I am just running out of time. if there is a plugin that would do this it would be great.
Kevin | July 6th, 2007 at 11:43 am #
cmanlong - I’m not sure what you mean. How could a plugin manually link to related posts inside an article?