Links on Your Blog: Internal linking describes the method of linking from one page to another page or post on your website or blog to another website or blog. Since search engine spiders may follow outbound links on your popular or frequently indexed pages, then it is a good idea to give the spiders plenty of your own internal links to follow. This may increase the number of pages from your site that are read, and consequently indexed, by the search engines. It may also disseminate Pagerank within your site. In this article we are going to discuss some of the ways to increase the internal linking on your blog.

Post Plug-in Library:
One method is to use the series of plug-ins developed by Rob Marsh, namely the Post-Plugin Library and its related plug-ins like, Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, Popular Posts, and Recent Comments. These can all be found at the main WordPress site, or at Rob’s site. The main WordPress site also lists a series of similar plug-ins which do the same job. For the most part, I have standardized my blogs on Rob’s plug-ins because they offer everything I need and provide a consistent means of managing the several plug-ins.

Once you have a reasonable head of content on your blog, these plug-ins can be used either as widgets, or by inserting them in to pages or posts, to provide on page links to other posts on your blog. This gives the aforementioned search engine spiders plenty of local content to chomp on, but also – perhaps more importantly – brings before the eyes of readers additional content they may be interested in seeing. These plug-ins can be used in numerous configurations, either individually, or in combination. Experimentation will allow you to build the best profile for your particular circumstances.

Manual Internal Linking:
Another method to increase the internal linking from individual posts is to manually link to previous posts. For example, if you have a past article on blue widgets and you make mention of blue widgets in a newer article then be sure to link back to your previous article when first mentioning blue widgets in the newer article.

A popular method that embraces this technique and takes it one step further by using older articles as the basis for present material. This way, you can start out your new article with an opener.

Automated Internal Linking:
A natural extension of manual internal linking, is automated internal linking. Fortunately for blog owners, one of the blog owner has created a plug-in to allow the association of links (both external and internal) to a word or phrase, and more. The plug-in is called SEO Smart Links and is available from the main WordPress plug-in directory of from their site.

Once installed, the settings allow you to configure a series of words or phrases each with a corresponding link. Each time the word or phrase is parsed by WordPress, a link to your specified target is automatically inserted.

This plug-in is extremely useful, particularly if you already have a large body of content on your site.

One aspect you should bear in mind when using this plugin is that, depending on the number of links you configure, it can impose a non-trivial overhead on your site.