Rankings are the holy grail and goal of SEO. A great (overlooked) tactic is interlinking between your own content. We’ll show you a technique to make your SEO interlinking more effective.
The What and Why of Interlinking
When you link to a page, Google not only sees that as an indication of trust it gives them an idea on the subject matter of the page.
If we have a page on our site all about our “WordPress Expertise” and we intentionally linked to it with that phrase or variations of it – Google would get the idea what that page was all about! (should be noted that linking to that “wordpress expertise” page within this post is so meta and a perfect case-in-point ;) !)
Now, getting these links from other websites is even better but you can and should be interlinking within your own site! There is a “PageRank damping factor” that won’t let you just keep escalating the power of interlinking on your own site, but you should still interlink when it makes sense and do it with SEO intentionality.
How to Make Interlinking Manageable
If interlinking isn’t easy, you won’t do it!
In WordPress adding a link to a piece of content within the same site is stunningly easy.
Highlight the text you want linked, type Ctrl+k (Command+k on Mac) or click the link icon. Then start typing a part of the title or URL for the content you are wanting to link.
Assign Keywords and Keep Track to Interlink Like a Pro
If you only have 5 keywords that map to 5 pages, then it may be manageable within your head. However, if you have dozens of keyphrases you are pursuing or you are working within a team of content writers then you need a better method.
Here’s the Keyword Interlinking Strategy that works for us…
1. Assign a Focus Keyword to Each Post
In the Yoast SEO tool this is easy and hopefully you’ve been doing it as you go along. If not, go back through and assign a focus keyword (think keyphrase) to each post.
2. Export a List of Your Posts
Use a tool like WP CSV to export a CSV file of all your posts. This file contains a column named “cf__yoast_wpseo_focuskw”. This “custom field” value is what contains your SEO Focus Keyword. So now you have a list of all your posts with the keyword mapped to each.
We recommend importing this CSV into a Google Sheet. Then you can easily share it with your team and keep it updated over time. If you only occasionally add posts it may be worth it to just manually add new Post Titles and Focus Keywords to your Sheet as time goes on.
3. Use the Spreadsheet when writing content
When you are writing a post (before and after) reference your spreadsheet and see if there are natural (and helpful!) ways you can link to these posts – using the keywords!