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 could just look this up on Google, but in the interest of developing community here, how does you find your Google page rank?
I've been trying to interlink as I go from the start, though not with all of this additional information in mind, so it might be productive to go back through my posts and see if I missed any linking opportunities.
And to state the obvious, this is where community can be helpful, by linking to each others' sites. Someone pointed out in an earlier 31 Days comment that social media has to be SOCIAL.
I'm under a couple of gigantic deadlines, one of which will be done tonight, and then I hope to hang around here more, and on the rest of the blogs represented here. But I'm still all in!
there are alot of tools out there. I go tohttp://www.seomoz.org and look there or go tohttp://www.websitegrader.com
I just thought of a question: Do tags have the same effect as internal links on your page ranking? They are, after all, internal links.
Link the tags, too!
I think tags are more like keywords, not links.
I actually did this today–linked my post to one of my tag pages. You can check it out and let me know your thoughts.
Today has been a productive day for me! I am one of those people that has been slacking lately because of real life getting in the way. I actually wrote my post about that today and I ended up creating an internal link and a list within my post today!
My blog post from today:http://tiny.cc/09jg0
Question: I am using WordPress and I get a message in my comments letting me know that someone has linked a link to my blog – but it's my link – do I trash this comment? I realized I don't want this comment showing under a post, but does it have any negative effects for me if I trash it? Does anyone know how I can stop WordPress from telling me that I linked to myself?
On a last note, thanks for all the plugin recommendations today!!
Trash those ping comments with no worries. You can stop those from coming by linking only with the stub, not the entire URL. The stub is the part that comes after yourdomain.com/
I have already been working on linking some of my posts, and I will continue to do so. I think it's valuable because it links information within your blog so you don't have to repeat yourself if it's already mentioned. I haven't yet figured out how to interlink with my most popular posts, but it's something I'm thinking about.
I do think interlinking can be overdone. Like everything else, moderation is the key.
I can't spend lots of time here today, unfortunately. I have a sick little one who needs my attention. I'm excited that I've been able to keep up so far though!
~Jennifer
Today's post:http://jenniferjanes.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/my-…
Good post Jennifer.
Thanks!
thanks for sharing, looking forward to reading the rest
Thank you! (And you're welcome.)
Ready to read part two!
Thanks! Check back at midnight tonight, if you're still up! 🙂
~Jennifer
Hi everyone !
I've been thinking about cross linking my posts on my blog, however I find it to be a lot of work to go through all my posts and find the link. I would like it to be simplier.
Paul, I've checked and can't find the plugin Link Within you wrote about in your lesson. Can you give me more details? Is it a plugin for WordPress? I'm interested in installing it on my blog.
Would any of you have other WordPress plugins to suggest that you've found really usefull? (It might be a subject for another place than here…)
Today's post is meant to be funny… Need to laugh at real life, having fun is essential 😉 http://lemondedenathalie.ca/2010/05/12/5-incontou…
The easiest way I have found to link without plugins is by searching by tag and linking to the tag search results. Since you do such a great job of tagging your posts this should work well. I love your blog template, layout, the bright colors and the images! And now I wish I had paid much more attention in French class. 🙂
The picture of the green face scared me. Thanks for posting about bondage.
I had never thought of nor heard of interlinking, though it does make sense. I had what would have been one long post I broke into two segments for publication. That would seem to be a logical place to start.
Since they just follow each other on my blog, I am not sure it will be as necessary. I will have to check into the mechanics of how to do it uses Blogspot. If anyone has any knowledge regarding the steps required, I'd appreciate the help!
http://divingdeepintograce.blogspot.com/
I would go ahead and interlink them because someone may find a single post through a search engine, but not know that you have written part 2. Linking directly to part 2 makes it much easier.
As far as how to interlink with Blogspot (and this is true of most editors). Write your post. Notice that above the blank form where you actually right your text there is a formatting toolbar. This will allow you to change the color of link, making text bold, etc. There is also a function labeled link. Click on that label. it will ask to enter the url of the page you want to link to. I always open the page in another tab or window and copy and paste the url from the address bar (that way to don't enter in the wrong info). It is also helpful to go ahead and make the text for the link a different color, it helps your readers see that there is something different. I hope that helps. If you need more detail just let me know.
Assignment complete and here is my post for the day: http://www.nolanbobbitt.com/welcome_to_nolans_wor…
As for Paul's question about participation attrition, I have three thoughts–1. The longer the project goes, the more natural it is for people to stop participating. 2. Some of the assignments are easy to apply and others are a little more tedious and/or less applicable. 3. Life often gets in the way of good blogging.
Thanks Nolan. I appreciate the feedback.
Here is my post on interlinking today.. It's a pretty common SEO practice to link to pages within your site. Going to have to try out some of the plugins now..
http://guardraildamageahead.com/31dbbb-day-8-inte…
I definitely think interlinking promotes further reading. People–including myself–like to be led. I often find myself clicking the links within other blog posts.
I do interlink on my blog, though not in every post–in fact not in most posts. I could probably utilize it more often. However, I think it can be overdone and a bit of a distraction simply because people can click the link mid-read and forget your vital, thought-out words. Kinda like call-waiting. But it definitely has its place.
I posted an interlink today to one of my specific tags. Check it out athttp://unrehearsedadventure.blogspot.com/2010/05/…
Thanks!
Wow! Thanks for all of the linking plug in suggestions everyone. Great resources.
I have done some interlinking on my own posts as in the post from yesterday:
http://theorganizedartist.blogspot.com/2010/05/wh…
I do feel as a reader that interlinking can get to be too much. As with anything, I prefer to see it done when it adds the greatest value to what is being discussed.