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
Hi all,
I have written an article called Help others see more of your blog.
In this blog post I look at a couple of ways to link between your posts, especially with the idea of helping your visitor to see more of your blog.
It is now 1:00am here in South Africa, and it is time to go to bed. I have to be up at 5am again!
Fortunately I do try to link posts sometimes….primarily when I do posts for blog loops like Word Filled Wednesdays…etc. I think this can be overdone but services like Linked Within make it cute with little pics. I know a man who does a christian apologetics site that links all within the text. That seems smart as well.
I tried linked within but GoDaddy Blog doesn't seem to like it. I called their tech service and we crashed the blog b/c their blog doesn't sem to like java. if anyone knows a way around this plz let me know.
ANyway my linked post today is: http://parentingtwinsandmore.com/2010/05/12/wfw-n…
The interlink was a good project to stretch me further in my blogging experience. I added a link in my blog post today. I hope it spurs further readership. I already have Link Within on my blog posts and I truly enjoy it. However, if one is doing a series of articles, I think manually entering the follow up posts would be better.
Here's my link for today:http://openmyearslord.blogspot.com/2010/05/sweet-…
I have been searching for a wordpress plugin that does the same as LinkWithin. Anyone know of such a plugin? I also posted my linked post. Sometimes it would be nice to have a few more hours in each day. 😉https://oikosministries.com/archives/1091
This exercise, the last time I went through 31DBBB, had a noticeable impact on my blog. People started finding old posts, and my ranking did go up… but only in the keywords of those posts (mainly Twitter posts last year).
Now that I am refocusing my blog thanks to this go-round of 31DBBB, I find that most of my old posts simply aren't worth linking! They don't often have the same quality I try to achieve these days. Oh well, a good trick to carry in my pocket moving forward, I guess.
The LinkWithin widget has been good. But I ran into a hiccup: I recently got my own domain and switched my blog to it. LinkWithin got confused. So now, it links my new posts (which it sees in my domain) only to other new posts, not to the old ones. Pity. Again, I just have to keep moving forward.
The number of comments from participants may have reduced but the quality of the comments have improved. This is partly due to the exposure from ourchurch.com. I have written a number of articles in my blog
http://www.christchosenambassadorsministry.com/ap…
You can equally visit our forum post at
http://www.christchosenambassadorsministry.com/ap…
We've been interlinking since we started. We achieve this by with "TAGS" or keywords. All like articles get similar keywords or share keywords. Then at the bottom of each article the relevant article links are displayed.
Let me know if this format works for you http://www.saysomagazine.com
This site is GREAT! I've learned so much!
Not sure if I posted on this since I use this technique…here is a post I just did that uses interlinks
http://parentingtwinsandmore.com/2010/05/20/tt-nd…
Only my meme posts get the interlinking
I suppose if I did it for all posts I would improve things.
And I think it woul be hard to overdo it=)
Now that I am refocusing my blog thanks to this go-round of 31DBBB, I find that most of my old posts simply aren’t worth linking! They don’t often have the same quality I try to achieve these days. Oh well, a good trick to carry in my pocket moving forward, I guess.