I had to smack myself on the head the other day when one of my fellow bloggers (one who knows nothing about SEO) expressed his frustration about a specific problem. Recently the Creative Fluff design blog had received a large number of hits for one specific post, but none of that traffic really went anywhere else on the site, and my friend was wondering, “Well, how do we get them to go elsewhere if they’re reading one article?” I had no immediate answer, but he quickly finished up his statement with, “Why aren’t words related to other parts of the website linked?” It was then that I smacked my head and realized I had completely forgotten about how important interlinking specific words to other posts was for a blog in terms of SEO value.
I quickly found that going in and manually editing all of my posts (well over a hundred) so that specific words were linked to relevant and contextual posts was a pan in the a**. So I quickly went about a search for anything to aid my post interlinking. With Google-searching ease, I found these four tools for linking words in posts to other related posts:
My personal favorite, and the one that I ended up deciding to use for any blogs I’m a part of because of the large amount of control you have over what gets interlinked, how it gets linked, why it’s linked, and where it goes. SEO smart links automatically generates links to related posts based on your tags and categories. You can then tell it to exclude certain words/keywords and at the same time you can limit interlinking to just tags, categories, or certain words if you so desire.
Another plugin that helps with interlinking on your blog; the difference is that this plugin takes whatever is in your blogroll and creates a link to it from any words that are the same as titles from your blogroll. “Blogroll Autolinker automatically turns names from your blogroll into links in your posts. Insert names from your Links Manager in posts and pages and they’ll be turned into links in the published post.”
What’s different about the In Series plugin is that it lets you write posts within a “series,” that is to say posts related to something like a category. You can add various posts to the series and then the plugin will link related/common words within any posts that belongs to a series. It will also link words that are within the title of a series to that relevant series. In my personal opinion, the entire process is a bit tedious but I could see this being useful to someone publishing a miniature encyclopedia of sorts (not a wiki necessarily).
These tools are by no means the only ones you can use but they were three different plugins that did a myriad of things related to interlinking posts. It might not create a large SEO impact, but we all know it’s the little things together that count.
