Many bloggers and writers opt for WordPress because it is very simple to use, it’s reliable and there is a great community behind it; always offering support, advice and comfort when you most need it. Yes, that is the way WordPress has grown up to be. But, there are also those who’re choosing WordPress for more technical reasons, like the ability to produce large amounts of content, or perhaps the ability to easily optimize your blog for search engines. Everyone has their reasons, but we’ll look at those who’re into the search engine stuff!

What are Internal Links?

Internal linking has been a long-known strategy for letting search engines know about the structure of your website and/or blog. If we were to link to our – WordPress themes – then that would be called internal linking. So, if we were to create a link to the official WordPress site, that would be called external linking; at which search engines look completely differently. Every link on your blog that links back to some content on your domain can be called internal link.

They’re essential to a good search engine optimization strategy, not only because they help search engines find more of your content, but because there are other factors in play: why are you linking to a particular internal page? Is it because the content is relevant, or it has other uses? This is how search engines index your site, but that’s a whole different topic on its own.

Improving Your Internal Link Structure in WordPress

There are a few methods to take advantage of when it comes to building healthy internal links on your WordPress blog, you can always take a look at other successful blogs and see what they’re doing to better index their internal content.

Internal Links in Posts

Once again, here is an example of how internal links work: if you’re in need of WordPress services, please visit the appropriate page to learn more. As you can see, we internally linked the phrase “WordPress services”, and you can do the exact same thing on each of the posts you submit. The thing to keep in mind is that you should add a maximum of 3-5 internal links on each post, and the closer they’re to the top of the post – the higher ranking search engines are going to give it.

Not only will this help search engines index your site better, you yourself will be able to learn more about your content, and how it comes together with other content that you publish.

Navigation a.k.a Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs WordPress
(Image: Screenshot / CodePen)

Breadcrumbs is just that, a way of navigating the site. But, not everyone realizes the benefit of this. You should be able to find plenty of plugins on the WordPress plugin repository for this specific purpose. Breadcrumbs work for everything: tags, categories, pages, content, etc. It makes navigating your blog a breeze! Some of our WordPress themes, for example MH Magazine, also have already built-in breadcrumb navigation.

Sidebar Widgets

We can start off by installing widgets that link to our previous content, such widgets include: recent posts, popular posts, recent comments, most socially shared posts, etc. This will give search engines (and your visitors) a good idea of what your site is about, and which content is trending at any given time. Every WordPress installation comes with a default widget that allows you to list recent posts. Another thing we can do, is use WordPress menus; which are usually used to list categories, and additional big-impact pages of your blog/website.

Sitemaps

What is a sitemap? A sitemap is a content index of your website. Google itself has a dedicated page about sitemaps, where you can find links to tools (that is also called internal linking), resources and advice on how to better organize your sitemaps. Many search engines depend on sitemaps for new content updates, and also for changes being made to previous content.

XML Sitemap

You can use standalone WordPress plugins to generate sitemaps, but for example – the SEO by Yoast plugin has an integrated sitemap builder; which automatically starts working once you activate the plugin.

Related Content

Related Content is content that is related to the main topic featured on the page. These links may be manually determined (by the content editor) or may be populated by the content management system based on predefined tags (e.g. a particular issue or region). Links to Related Content are often displayed on a narrow column to the right of the main body copy on the page or below the main content.

Improve Link Structure
(Image: fill – Pixabay – CC0 Public Domain)

The most common plugin for this is known as the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), and is free to use, as well as easy to setup. You can, of course, create manual forms and submit related content manually. (Less database queries, and possibly more relevance.) Or you could just choose a WordPress theme which has related content already built into the layout.

Improving Your Internal Link Structure in WordPress

For certain there are more ways to improve the internal link structure on your website. But we’ve taken a close look at the most popular ways of constructing healthy internal links on your WordPress website/blog.

ClickWhale - WordPress Link Manager