A lot of people seeking to own a website, primarily for blogging, opt for WordPress because it is very simple to use, it’s reliable, and there is a great community behind it to offer the required support. More to it, WordPress is a space where users have the flexibility of producing large amounts of content, with a lot of functionality when it comes to optimizing the site for search engines.
Without proper optimization, it is hard to rank on the first page of Google, leave alone satisfy your audience. Website owners go all out in finding ways to optimize their sites, and for the most part, the internal linking has to come into the picture. For WordPress users, the benefits of internal linking are just as pronounced as with other sites. The only difference is that, given the large amounts of content you can produce on a WordPress site, you need a reliable strategy to help search engines find more of your content. Find out below how you can improve your internal link structure for your WordPress site and be deserving of the first spots on Google’s SERP.
Internal Links in Posts
The number one most-used strategy in internal link structure is using the links in posts. You cannot share a piece of your content without fully maximizing on its potential, leveraging on the traffic it will draw to make your website more visible. Ideally, since you have a niche you focus on in your blogs, it should be easy to find a connection between your posts. The idea is to include links within all your posts, that link to each other. The more you point people to your content, the more traffic you attract, not to mention, the longer you keep visitors on your platform.
However, in including links within posts, you have to be careful that they come out natural instead of forced. Other than that, be intentional to keep the number of links you use in check so that you have a maximum of 3-5 internal links on each post.
WordPress helper – existing content linking
While on the issues of adding internal links in posts, employ the help of the WordPress helper. The tool on the Insert/edit link dialogue box is one that will help you add links within posts, by showing you all your previous posts in a dropdown menu for you to select the most suitable. It is a useful tool, especially in cases you can quite remember the title of the article you want to link to or even the URL.
Sidebar Widgets
The sidebar widgets should help you highlight the most critical things on your site. You can, therefore, use sidebar widgets to link to your previous content, for example, recent posts, popular posts, recent comments, most socially shared posts, among others. This way, search engine crawl bots will be more aware of what your site contains, as visitors find an easier time accessing content, more so the material trending at a given time.
Sitemaps
While most bloggers on WordPress overlook Sitemaps, they are very crucial in matters of internal linking. Search engines usually depend on sitemaps, which are content indexes of a website, for new content updates, including recent changes in a piece of work. To generate sitemaps for your WordPress site, consider plugins like Yoast SEO. The good thing with this plugin is that it starts working automatically, the moment you activate the plugin on your website.
Your WordPress site does not always have to lag on Google’s SERP. As you invest your efforts on generating optimized content, you may want to invest a little more effort and time on improving your internal link structure for best results. Learn how to leverage on keywords for best SERP.
