As a blogger you should always be looking for ways to improve your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and as such there’s one small but significant thing that you can be doing to maximise your search potential with relative ease. This may not be a trick that you can start doing right away with a brand new blog, but it’s certainly something that new bloggers should be aware of. Without further ado, let’s get into it.
A great way to boost your blog’s SEO is to go back through older posts and add relevant, internal links to related posts that you’ve written since then – helping the reader to find all of the necessary answers that they could possibly be asking for. It’s only natural that when your blog was brand new, you didn’t have any internal links that you could add to your posts. Well, hopefully now that’s no longer a problem. As you continue to write more and more blog content, you should be going back and improving each article that you’ve previously published to ensure that it’s THE best article on that particular subject.
Why is this good for SEO? Well for one, Google take kindly to websites that are regularly keeping their content up to date, as it shows that your blog is active and staying on top of the latest trends and news. Of course though the quality of your content still plays a huge part, as there’s no point in updating your blog posts – only to make them worse!
The second reason why you should be updating older blog posts, is quite possibly the more important reason; in that including related articles within your blog posts helps to keep the reader on your site for longer, of which it tells Google that your website produces great content. How do they figure that? They can tell this by analysing your site’s “Bounce Rate”. Your website’s Bounce Rate refers to the amount of people who leave your site within a short-amount of time after visiting. The higher your bounce rate is, the more likely that your content (or website layout) is poor – and the less likely that Google will feature your site towards the top of their search results.
To add to this, the inclusion of relevant links will give the reader a better experience, as you will be able to assist them with a number of things that they may be interested in or curious about. For instance they may have visited your website because they wanted to know why they were suddenly losing Instagram followers, but then whilst reading the post they were interested enough to click on the link showing them how they can get more followers on Instagram. These are two completely separate posts, however the latter is something that that the reader could realistically be interested in given the post that they were initally reading.
If the reader can find all of the answers on your blog, then they’ll soon associate you as being an expert in the field, and keep coming back for more!
I forgot to say that there was a third reason why you need to go back and re-add internal links to your posts, that being that some of your articles aren’t linked to any other page or post at all. If that were the case for any of my posts, then the reader would only be able to find them by scrolling through my posts on the blog page, or by finding them on a very specific Google search result. You need to make it easy for the reader to find your posts, so start writing some relevant content and start creating links between all of them.
How can I see which posts need internal links?
If you’ve been using WordPress for long enough then you’ll know there’s a fantastic plugin called Yoast SEO. You can use the plugin to show you how many external links a blog post has, as well as how many internal links are directed to said blog post too. You can sort your posts by the latter to find out which of them need a little TLC. An example of this can be seen as per the screenshot below:
As you can see from the above screenshot, my post on ‘Is This Cadbury’s Sweetest Advert Yet?’ doesn’t have any internal links directed to it (well, apart from the link I’ve just added now). This means that it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to find that post, unless they search for it my main blog page. The reason why I haven’t added internal links to this post is because I don’t really have any related content for it, however that’s not the case for my two other posts with zero internal links; ‘How To Get Facebook Ad Management Clients’ and ‘How To Avoid Creative Burnout On Social Media’. These two posts could, and should, be linked to other social media related posts to improve the likelihood of the reader finding them.
Alternatively when using the Yoast SEO plugin, you can order your posts by the amount of outbound-internal links that each post has, which can make it easier to spot which posts need to share the love a bit more. I myself would be focusing on the posts that have little, or no, outbound-internal links and then searching through all of my posts to see if they could be of any help to the reader. If not, then I’ll write a brand new post that can be!
Interested to know how you could be monetizing your blog? Check out this post which explains the 7 Best Ways To Monetize Your Website and start making some passive income in no time!
Conclusion
Adding relevant internal links to your blog posts can help to keep your reader’s interest, as well as improve their user experience on the site, both of which can help dramatically when trying to convince Google to rank you higher in relevant search results. It’s highly recommended that you regularly keep your blog content up to date, updating information and adding relevant, internal links to all of your blog posts to be as helpful as possible to the reader.
Do you have any questions or feedback on this post? Let me know in the comments below!
2 Responses
Amazing content! Keep it up!
Thank you Luciana 🙂