Blog Exercise #8

Interlink your old blog posts.

Did you think I had forgotten? Nope. I just got a little sidetracked the past few weeks.

Interlinking previously written posts in your archives builds a better blog. The main reason is that it simply provides a better experience for your blog readers. If a reader comes to your blog and finds a post that not only answers their question, but also provides further reading and suggestions on where to explore related topics, they’re more likely to go away satisfied. A satisfied reader is more likely to return (it makes your blog “sticky”) and tell their network about their experience. Secondly, search engines (SEO's) look at the links within a blog to find content to index but also to work out how to index and rank content. Links from other blogs to your blog are the ultimate way to start ranking highly in Google but internal links also count.

Here's are 2 ways how to do it:
1. In Post Links—the most natural way to add links to an old post. All it involves is making a keyword (or words) in your post into a link that points to another post on the topic of that keyword.
2. Further Reading—many blogs have a Further Reading section that appears at the bottom of each post. In most cases this is a list of related posts that are automatically generated using a plugin. While this can sometimes provide readers with relevant results, I find that adding manually chosen links for further reading can produce a more relevant experience. You can add these suggested links both at the end of the post and throughout the post itself.

3 Quick Tips on Interlinking Posts
1. Try to build this task into your daily posting schedule. It takes a little discipline to get into the rhythm of it but it can have some real benefits if you do.
2. For bloggers with large archives who can't remember every post they've ever written, one way to help you find your previous posts is to have a “related posts” plugin on your blog. These will often present you with suggestions on older posts that might be relevant.
3. Also, if you have a lot of content that you've never interlinked before, start with the most popular posts.