This is Day 8 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a group project 60+ of us bloggers are doing together in an effort to help each other become better bloggers. You can read an overview here.
Yesterday we explored the value of writing a link post. A focus of this type of post is to send your readers out to valuable resources on other blogs. In today’s tip you are going to turn around and essentially do the same for your own blog.
Today’s assignment is to interlink your old blog post. This task may be harder for those you who have been blogging for years now. It can also be difficult for us newbies who don’t have many posts to connect together. Whichever case you find yourself in its an essential task. As Darren points out:
1. It will help your readers. Providing your readers with links about where to go next will make their job of navigating your site much easier.
2. It increases your pageviews. While must of us aren’t running ads on our blogs, pageviews can increase your advertising income if you are during cost per impression ads. For those who aren’t running ads the increased pageviews simply mean that readers are becoming more engaged with your blog. Chances are that if they read enough and like it that will become a subscriber and pass your information on to others.
3. The power of Search Engine Optimization. You may not have known what this was before starting this project, but you won’t forget it by the time this is over. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have the power to send readers to your site. But they only reward the sites that they believe provide the best information for the terms entered in the search box by that potential reader. Search engines use algorithms to figure out who gets ranked where and bloggers endlessly debate what goes into the algorithm, but most agree that linking plays a role.
So how do you interlink your blog?
1. You could add a link in the middle of your post. If you reference something that you talked about previously on the blog go ahead and provide the reader with a link to it so that they don’t have to search your archives.
2. Updates. Take and old posts and breathe new life into it.
3. At the end of your post share some “Further Reading.” This can take a couple of approaches. Obviously you could do it manually. This allows you to hand pick certain posts. You can also use I plugin to automatically pick posts for you. I currently use Link Within. In automatically picks 3 related posts and features a thumbnail of each one at the bottom of every post I write.
While the automatic feature is nice, there are certainly times when you would want to handpick certain posts for further reading. One way to make this easier on yourself is to think ahead of time about how you categorize/tag your posts. Carefully making this decision will help when you looking for related posts in the future.
Discussion
- What are your thoughts on interlinking your content?
- If you are already interlinking, do you interlink with every post or just your most popular ones? How might taking a different approach improve your blog?
- Do you think interlinking can be overdone?
The Extra Mile
A few other things you can do to take your blog, other bloggers, and this project even further today…
- Reply & give other bloggers feedback on the little things they do.
- When other bloggers include a link to a new article they’ve posted today, click, read, and comment on it.
- Check previous posts in the series for new comments.
- Tweet, share, & bookmark this post.
J.D. Eddins is husband and father of 3 girls and avid runner. He works for a Christ-centered drug treatment center in Arkansas. You can find his blog at The Training Crucible and on Twitter at jdeddins.
96 Comments
I hadn't really thought about linking a few more posts at the bottom. I didn't even know what a bounce rate was before this started. Mine was like 55% and I wondered why it wasn't higher and what I could do to get it up there. lol
Here is my post for today:
http://campfirecowboyministries.com/2010/05/cowbo…
My Thoughts:
Interlinking is great to keep readers on your blog, if the links are relevant.
I basically interlink with related links (too the category) on each post – but that is too general.
The only problem with interlinking (correct me if I am wrong here) is that the value obtained (for SEO purposed) is dependent on how well your site does in Google's eyes in the first place. That is to say – the higher ranked site benefit way more because Google using the value of the referring site. So the rich get richer, and the poor; they fight tooth and nail 😉
My Post
As part of the task I decided to go back and take a look at how far I have come in my blog, on Friday it is my 2nd birthday as a blog, so I highlighted my first post and where I was at the end of my first year – and of course what story I want to tell next year.http://synapticlight.com/2-years-of-blogging/
Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂
Happy birthday Phillip 😉
thanks man. I need to do something special. 🙂
Regarding the SEO, a basic rule of thumb I use when explaining SEO to people is…
Page strength x relevance (to the phrase searched) = search rankings
Generally speaking, page strength is determined by the number of links to a page and the strength of the pages linking. Relevance is determined by text on the page as well as the text in the links to the page.
Internal linking is not going to improve the overall strength of one's blog, but it can improve the strength of the posts linked to. Internal linking can also improve the relevance of the ones posts if the link text has keywords in it.
So, the bottom line is internal linking can improve both factors that lead to improved search rankings. When that happens it's possible for a posts in a less popular but well optimized and well organized blog to outrank posts in a more popular but poorly optimized and poorly organized blog.
thanks, I need to make better use of keywords and links in my blog. When I see those SEO articles I start to wonder about supper and what I'ld rather be doing.
LOL!
you laugh!
I have a tab here on FF, been there for a day or two on a pdf by Dave Clark: How To Create Compelling Content That Ranks Well In Search Engines.
I made it to the first line.
ha ha ha
now I am laughing
From what I have read, interlinking actually helps the "search spiders" that look at your site do a better job of indexing your posts, making it rank higher with Google. While it is probably not the most important part (I think great content is) it certainly is a key to having success.
Guess a bit of insomnia can be a good thing, as I got this assignment done early for a change 🙂
I have been interlinking all along so this wasn't a hard assignment. Plus I got lucky in that a comment left yesterday inspired today's blog entry. And thanks for the Link Within tip, installed and running!.
http://blog.beachdaze.com/?p=71 (yeah I know I gotta get more friendly URLs..just too lazy to read how to change it in WP.)
Peace,
B
You want "Dean's Permalinks Migration" plugin – that'll fix your problems whilst not killing any SEO benefit from the old URL's.
yeah, I use that – it's great.
Thanks Stuart. Installed it and it's working great!
Also try Smart Tags. That will auto-tag common words used frequently in your posts.
Thanks Erica, I'll look into this one.
I know that in WordPress there is a plugin, I think it is called the All-in-One SEO that makes changing your post URL quite easy.
Good post.. Worship music gets sooooo many people in an uproar..
Good morning! I love it when the 31DBBB posts are published early. Thanks!
Since I started linking internally, my Google page rank has gone from zero to three in about three months. There must be something to the ranking algorithm that rewards lower bounce rates and the number of page views during each visit. People do stay to read more if you provide a map to your site, so to speak.
I wrote more about this in today's post assignment. Have a great day!
http://wp.me/pL6TU-N4
Well your PR is one better than mine, so perhaps I should interlink more.
Erica, that's an interesting point concerning search engines rewarding lower bounce rates. I hadn't considered that.
I would add, though, that the pagerank (PR) we see on the Google toolbar is not the same PR that Google uses in its search rankings. Google only updates the toolbar PR once every 3-6 months.
So, it's possible after starting a new blog to go 3-6 months with a toolbar PR of 0 and then when Google finally updates their toolbar PR data jump to a 3, and that 3 be a reflection not just of what the blogger has done recently but the culmination of everything done over those 3-6 months.
I thought about that PR thing after I left the comment. This is all new to me and it's sometimes confusing. Thanks for the extra info!
Going to have to try out those SEO tools.. thanks
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to Entertain Aliens…
http://greeninventionscentral.blogspot.com/2010/0…
🙂
Another one that made me actually laugh out loud!
Paul, you asked why.
Um, it's tiring! 🙂
Yeah, I have to agree! Especially if someone wants to give it the attention it deserves, then it can be a lot of work.
Others may loos interest if they don't see immediate results as well, or if they feel like an outsider. Not saying that either of these is the case, but could be a possibility.
Yeah, good point. I know I'm whooped. But that's mostly because I'm getting 4 hrs of sleep a night.
I will always interlink a referenced prior post of mine – especially if it's a series I'm writing.
Howevre, I was a little daunted by the thought of referencing prior posts and have no idea what to write about it – so instead I cheated and found a plugin to do the job fo rme. WordPress FTW again. Now every post on my blog has 5 related posts without much effort on my side. Result.
What plugin do you use?
Hi Kathryn – I used "Contextual Related Posts". Simply do a search from with WP and auto-install it and activate. Didn't have to do anything else at all.
How easy and cool is that.?
Thanks! I'm going to try it… but, unfortunately, I typically don't find any of the technical aspects of blogging "easy and cool." 🙂 I'll let you know….
It worked like a charm! Thank you! Do you have a similar suggestion for a TypePad blog?
That's a cool idea. I'm a bit of a control freak though, so I'm not sure I could handle the computer interlinking my posts for me, but it sounds like a cool idea.
Well there were plenty of other plugins to pick from – this one had almost 5 stars and did what I needed. Sorted.
I feel the same way. In my post for today I handpicked some posts that I wanted to make sure readers would see, but on most days I think having at least some recommended links are better than having no recommended links.
This is my first interlink. http://ronniespoon.blogspot.com/
Good post on prayer!
I use a wordpress plugin to offer related posts by category. There are several different plugins that will do this for you. Also, in this post I linked by to a couple of other posts in the body as it is part of a series. Right now the links are duplicated because the blog is new and the category only has the posts of this series in it but that will change as more posts are added to the category.
Here is today's post: http://larrywestfall.com/five-stages-of-a-failing…
What plugin is that?
Nathalie I'm sorry it took me so long to reply. I have been super busy. The plugin is "add post footer." It allow me to add the number of related post I would like in the footer section as well as giving me the option to add text or html code. I just looked up the words "add post footer" in the wordpess plugin search from the dashboard and it was at the top of the list.
in answer to your question… i am realising more and more that this exercise is perhaps better suited to a blog that very specifically offers a service or a specific type of content. a lot of bloggers blog as a general life practice. therefore the blogging is less focused. i am finding that i am starting at day 1 again but doing it with my business blog instead. however where i find the content to be relevant, i apply it to my personal/photography blog.
Great point Claire! There is a form of blogging that is much like personal journalling, and other forms that strive to increase traffic. Mine, for example, lies somewhere in between. It is not a business, but I am finding that many of these tips help me achieve some personal goals that I have with it.
What you are pointing out should be an important distinction that a blogger should make when creating a blog… what their goals are. And if their goals are not to grow numbers, then that is okay too!
I'd love to hear more about how these tips are working out for your business blog!
I think that interlinking for a personal blog may actually be even more important because it is less likely that you could use one of the plug-ins that we have talked about here.
The reason I say that is this: think about all the topics that you have talked about it in your personal life, surely there is some overlap. Maybe you have dealt with the same situation a year ago, compare how you handled it now with how you handled it then. Update posts are great opportunities to interlink your posts.