Interlinking is one of the good blogging practices that you need to do as a blogger. Internal links come with great benefits for your blog.
If you are a beginner, interlinking is putting a link on one of your blog posts that points to another blog post on your blog.
Though interlinking packs great benefits, not so many bloggers pay attention to it. Some do interlinking just as a pass time activity.
But if you take your time to tune your internal links, you will reap great benefits.
Benefits of Interlinking Blog Posts
1. Traffic to all Blog Posts
Readers don’t come to your blog through all blog posts. In most cases, a few blog posts will bring you majority of the traffic. The rest of the articles will bring little or no traffic.
Interlinking your blog posts will help in getting readers to those articles that get no traffic. You can send readers to those articles that get no traffic by inserting links in articles that get lots of traffic.
The click through rate to the articles you have linked to may not be great but if your blog post is getting thousands of readers, the other article will get a few hundred visitors.
This benefit of interlinking has taken root in blogging where some bloggers intentionally write some articles with no intention of ranking them. Then they write other articles specifically to drive traffic to the articles that get no traffic.
You may hear some bloggers talking of information articles and money articles. In simple terms, the information articles are those articles on the blog that are responsible for attracting visitors.
Then when visitors come to the information articles, they are sent to money articles through internal links. Money articles are those articles that sell the reader something.
It is difficult to write a blog post that is both good at attracting visitors and convincing them to buy a product. That is why most bloggers use internal links to get readers to those articles that convince a reader to buy a product.
2. More Time on Site
Internal links are responsible for keeping readers on your blog for longer. When readers land on your blog, they often come for specific information.
Once they get the information they wanted, they leave. But if you have built internal links in your blog posts, readers are likely to click on other articles after getting the information they came for instead of leaving straight away.
When readers stay longer on your blog, they tend to like you more. If you have a product to sell them, they are likely to buy it after they read several articles on your blog.
Engaged readers on your blog will earn you more money. For a blog that has ads on it, if a reader reads multiple articles, he will view multiple ads. With multiple ad views, you earn more money.
Time spent on a website is a ranking factor in search engines. When search engines see that readers are staying longer on your blog, they conclude that your content must be great. They will then rank your articles among the top slots for specific search terms.
3. Spreading Information on your Blog
Internal links are great at enabling you spread information across your blog posts. Instead of piling all knowledge in one blog post, you can spread information across several blog posts then interlink them.
The advantage of spreading information across blog posts is that you can add information anytime you want by writing another blog post then linking to it.
Also, having several interlinked blog posts talking about the same topic gives you a greater opportunity for exposure. One of the articles may do well in bringing traffic which is then shared among the other articles.
When your information is spread among interlinked blog posts, readers on any of your blog posts will have a reason to click to the other blog posts.
With a lot of clicking from one blog post to another, your readers are less likely to leave your blog.
4. Defined Blog Structure
It is difficult to know the structure of a blog that does not use internal links. Interlinking helps define the structure of a blog.
When you link articles that are in the same category, it becomes easy for readers to know that you have several articles in that category.
If your readers are interested in that category, they will not have to go looking for information on other blogs.
Search engines also use internal links to know which blog posts are related. The advantage is that if one of your articles that are in the interlinking web performs well, other articles will benefit too.
When you are creating your internal links, make sure that articles that are in the same category are interlinked.
For other blogs, small blog posts link to one in depth post often called a cornerstone blog post. This cornerstone blog post can be a page to convert readers into buyers.
Internal links help readers navigate to the cornerstone blog post because the structure of the blog is defined.
5. Spreading Authority across your Blog
The authority of a website is an important factor in search engines. Authority of a blog comes from the links that point to it from other blogs.
When other blogs find content that is great on your blog, they link to it. The blog post that has external links pointing to it will have greater authority.
For you to spread the authority across your blog, you need to interlink your articles. When you send links from a high authority blog post to low authority blog posts, the authority of the blog posts with low authority increases.
Spreading authority to other blog posts builds the authority of your entire blog.
When interlinking is properly done, all your blog posts will have almost equal authority even when only a few of them are responsible for bringing backlinks.
Benefits of Interlinking Blog Posts Conclusion
Internal links are necessary for every blog. If you have a blog, take more time to do proper interlinking. The benefits of interlinking your articles cannot be overlooked.
If you have many articles on your blog that you didn’t interlink, look for plugins that create internal links automatically. You can as well hire someone on fiverr to create internal links for you.
All the best!