Why You Should Interlink Your Blog Posts (And How to do it Right)

Not only is interlinking crucial for on-site navigation, it can also contribute greatly to your on-page SEO (search engine optimisation). Internal links help to keep your site indexed, although they should be strategically placed and you should try to only interlink related articles.

Why You Should Interlink Your Blog Posts (And How to do it Right)

There are a couple of things you should consider before you start to interlink your articles. #1, are your articles related? (Meaning, do they share a common theme or topic?) #2, search engines will only reference the first instance of a link. (So if you post the same link multiple times within one article, it will only be referenced once. Any more could be considered as spam, or over-optimising.)
 

Why is it important to interlink posts?

I already mentioned the benefits of interlinking when it comes to site indexing, but it can also help in other ways. The first is keeping a visitor on your site for longer. How many times have you found yourself on Youtube, for example, clicking through related videos and, before you know it, two hours have passed? An internal link on your blog implies value on the other side. If a visitor has gotten something out of the article they’ve just read, they are likely to click through to another.

Interlinking to older posts in your newer articles can help to stop them getting buried and forgotten. Just because an article was written a few years ago, doesn’t make it any less valuable.
 

Choosing Your Anchor Text

The anchor text is simply the link text. It should generally include the keywords that you want to rank on, but they should be well-placed and related to the bulk of your content. You should focus on being descriptive and sounding natural. The sentence that you link from should flow naturally in your writing.
 

WordPress Plugins for Interlinking

If you are a WordPress user, you can easily link related articles using a plugin. These often create a widget at the end of your article listing similar posts. Although this can be visually for your readers, search engine crawlers are more likely to index links that appear high in your HTML (ie near to the beginning of your code).

You can find many related post plugins such as Yuzo – Related Post and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). This is a quick and easy way to automatically add internal links to your posts, but you should not rely solely on a plugin.