How to Increase Blog Traffic with Internal Linking
Just by linking a blog post to others on your blog, you can significantly increase traffic to your blog site. A task that takes only a few seconds can yield excellent results. what do you need to know?
As a blog owner, one of your goals will be to increase the number of readers of your blog. You want new readers to visit your site, and you want them to read more pages than they are currently reading.One of the easiest ways to do this is to guide them through your site as they read the posts, and you can use internal links to do that.
That's exactly what they're called: links to pages on your site (that is, internal) versus links on other sites, which would be "external." What is the purpose of these links?
1 - Guide readers through your blog
When you write a new post, think about previous posts and whether they are relevant to what you are writing about. You might be writing a post that briefly mentions a topic that you've already blogged about extensively. Since this is a more detailed view of what you're writing about, it makes sense that it might be of interest to readers as well, so link to the post.
Once your blog post is live, there's nothing wrong with going through the old posts and linking to the new post. While this doesn't have the same benefits as the links in the last post, it does help keep the blog fresh and current.
2 - Search Engine Optimization
When you publish a new post (usually!), it gets moved to your blog's homepage and stays there for a few days. Most blogging tools also "ping" the major search engines to let them know there's a new post to visit.
This means that recent posts are highly visible to search engines, but old posts are somewhat "forgotten". By linking your newer work to older pieces, search engines direct you to the archives.This helps "distribute" the link in favor of your website.
Occasionally, and I do it more occasionally than not often, using keywords and keyword phrases in those links can also help your SEO processes a bit.
3 - Content Theft Revenge
This might seem like an odd benefit, but it's a trick I've successfully exploited in the past when my blog's content was routinely stolen. The technique these people use is to download your blog content via their RSS feed and post it on their own blogs. Recently, with Google updates penalizing duplicate content, this isn't such a big issue, but when it does happen, this technique can ensure you see some benefits!
If you add internal links to your posts and someone copies your content to your site, they become external links from their site to yours. You could get some SEO benefit (unlikely since Google penalizes such sites) while readers of the stolen site will at least see links to your site.However, since all of your posts point to your own website, it's an important clue for Google that your website was the original source of the content.
How to use this link?
There are many plugins you can use to show related posts, but I prefer the simple approach of manually adding links in one post to other posts. That way, the links are where the reader is reading and ready to click. Don't try to be smart about search engine optimization. You don't have to include each of these links in your keywords.Go the other direction and just make them natural and appropriate to the context of the page. If "click here for more info" is the best solution then use it. All that matters is that readers and search engines can begin to follow the web of links you leave behind and quickly find relevant posts.
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