We spend so much time worrying about building external back links that it is easy to neglect our own internal linking structure.
Here we take a look at how to maximise reader penetration and reduce bounce rate.
Problem: Once you have got someone onto your site, how do you ensure they find all the important pages you want them to see? More importantly, how do search engines know which are your sites core pages?
Solution: The Simple Affiliate Links plugin can automatically convert keywords in your content into internal links that will lead your readers to the key pages on your site.
Optimising Your WordPress Internal Links
It is likely that your website will have some key hub pages (sometimes called sneeze pages) that will link out to your top content, or perhaps your goal is to funnel visitors towards a sales page.
Either way you need to make sure your articles contain links, within the post content, that lead directly towards your website’s key pages.
There are many different goals for your internal links, for example:
- I want my category pages to be high ranking central hubs. I therefore try to ensure all of my blog posts contain links to their parent category pages and hopefully search engines will begin to see these parent pages as a key resource for information on any given topic.
- If your goal is to direct people to a sales funnel, you’ll want all of your posts to contain links into that funnel. Readers may arrive on your site via a specifc content article, but ultimately you want to get those people into your sales funnel and hopefully convert them!
Constantly adding the same links into every post quickly becomes a bore! Wouldn’t it be easier to automatically generate these links?
Using an Auto Linking WordPress Plugin
So how can you set this up with the Simple Affiliate Links Plugin? Thankfully it is very easy to do!
- Pick out a key page of your website and decide which keywords you want to link. For example you might want to encourage discussion in your site’s forum.
- Next, enter the destination URL into the plugin Link Manager. In my example I tap in “jezza101.co.uk/forum”
- And then I add in a list of words or phrases that I want to be automatically converted into this link within my posts. For example, come share your thoughts in our forum.
As you can see above the specified phrase is automatically converted into a link in this post as well as all past and future posts! If I change the URL of the forum it’s a simple update in the Link Manager and all links are re-pointed to the new destination!
And sure enough, if you google “forum jezza101” you get the expected page jumping out at the top.
Simple!
Want to try it yourself? Download the Simple Affiliate Links Plugin
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi mate
Not sure if it’s a theme issue but can’t get the plugin to automatically change phrases to links
Also, how do I change it so that the link is to the actual page, and not the plugin redirect.php?
Hi Si, thanks for having a test, no one else has got back to me on anything yet!
If you want the link to be the original one then you need to untick the “Cloak and track the link” box.
I wonder if it is worth having a global default option and/or allow links to be cloaked / uncloaked from the higher level list of links. No one wants to go into each link when changing this option!
I test the plugin using the default twenty-ten theme, but there is always a chance a more complex theme (or another plugin) might cause a problem. Which theme are you using?
I’m using Woo Themes’ Headlines theme
Will untick the cloak box thingy and see how it goes