How Interlinking Strengthens Your Business Blog

Understanding SEO for Beginners and the popular 5 Quick Tips for SEO in Blogging.  These posts are for general use and when put into practice will help kick start your education on the process.

One thing that is often overlooked in terms of importance in your blog is interlinking. You are probably asking yourself, what is interlinking and why is it is critical to the health of my site?

Interlinking is a method of linking posts internally.

I am sure that as you read sites or visit retail websites, you have clicked on links contained within a post that takes you to another page within the site. That is interlinking.

So what’s the big deal? There are many reasons that this is important for the strength of your business and blog. In terms of SEO, interlinking will allow you to offer that page you are linking to better authority and strength according to the search engine crawlers. They will think, “Hey- if you are linking to it, then it must have relevancy to your article and therefore be important.” That is a good thing!

Interlinking will also help with PageRank when looking at per page ranking instead of just entire site ranking. You may have pages that are weaker in that they did not get a lot of traffic. Linking to them as a resource can help improve that.

There are many other reasons interlinking is something you need to be including in your business blogging. Some have to do with your website strength and others have to do with your value to your reader and customer. Together it is a win for you.

Check out these additional reasons:

• Beneficial to your readers – if they are interested in a topic or item, by offering additional resources for them to read will make your site more valuable to them. You want to keep them entertained and reading.
• Leads to Improvement on your Bounce rate – the bounce rate is what Google analyzes when they look at how long someone stays on your page, what they click on and how many pages they look at and go through. The lower the Bounce rate, the better and more important your site can be. The search engines will assume that you offer valuable content for your readers.
• Ensures that all of your pages are indexed by the search engines – This is especially important as the spider bots come through your site. They too will follow the internal links in your site.

How do you actually perform Interlinking?

There are multiple methods that you can use. The first is by simply finding a relevant post in your archives and linking it. Within Wordpress and most blog editors, you will see the link function button on the tool bar. Highlight the text you want to link, click the link button and then paste in the url of the page into the box that pops up. There is also a tiny drop down within the box too where you can “link to existing content”. That is a bit of a time saver for you if it is a newer post.

You can also use what is called Breadcrumbs. This is a feature that is built into many Wordpress themes that will show you a path according to where you are in the site. You will also recognize it from retail shopping sites too, like this image from a blog site.

It tells you where you are in the site. Home – Category – Then Article Title. It could also be more like Home – Mens Clothing – Suits – Size. It is connecting internal links for you.

There are also plugins for Wordpress that will offer relevant articles for your reader as well. You can find them for breadcrumbs; I like the one by Yoast and you can find some plugins that will rotate your archives and display them under each post for your reader too.

I am using Wordpress here as an example, but most any type of blogging platform have similar features.

There are some additional things to know about interlinking:

• You do not have to use main keywords to interlink your old posts. You can use a long tail keyword or just a few short words that describe the post you will be linking to.
•  Don’t go crazy with your links. You do not need more than a few links in your post, especially if it is a short one. You can add links to each post if you choose.

Interlinking for your business blog really is a great way to add some strength and authority to your site without a ton of work. Plus your readers will appreciate the additional content too!