Unleash WordPress: How To Effectively Incorporate Linking Into Your Blog Posts

(Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes)

Are you providing quality links for your readers? High quality links, to pages both inside and outside your blog or website, provide incredible value to your readers, for very low cost.

Back when the web first became public (~1994), this “hyperlinking” thing was incredibly exciting. Finally, all the world’s knowledge could be integrated into a unified “web,” one giant document where you could start anywhere, and get anywhere else simply by clicking links. That hasn’t quite come to pass, although Wikipedia has many aspects of this vision. The WordPress personal publishing platform may well provide another aspect of the web vision by enabling a far larger number of people to publish at will, to the world at large.

Creating a useful web publication requires high quality content, which can be divided into writing and linking, then joined by making the linking part of the writing.

There’s two kinds of links:

1. internal linking to a different web page on the same web site, and
2. external or outbound linking to a web page on a different web site.

You should master using both.

Internal linking

Internal linking places each article you write into context with all the rest of your articles, and helps unify your website. In my recollection, internal linking was much more common in the 1990s before SEO and “link juice” became overly important.

One great way to use internal linking is to help tell your story. Link back to existing web pages. Once you have a few dozen articles published, go back through the early articles and link forward to the new articles, rewriting and rewording as necessary to tell your story.

Now, there’s a notion popular in blogging that once you publish, you should never make any significant changes to your article. Hogwash. Back before blogging was invented, updating web pages was extremely common, so much so that many people would put a “last updated” tag on the web page. Smart bears would have the web page automatically time stamped using version control software such as CVS or SCCS (subversion wasn’t invented then). You were expected to keep your web pages up to date! If you’re still troubled by updating older work, read “Developing Your Website’s Editorial Policy” and set your editorial policy in stone, not your articles.

There’s another kind of internal linking that’s not commonly discussed: linking to a different website served from the same IP address and operated as an “addon” domain. Rightly or wrongly, some search engines group results by IP address. Duplicate content on the same IP address is punished on both websites. One way around this is to consider each addon domain as a part of larger, meta-website, and link between both. For example, Website In A Weekend is an addon domain for There Is No Box, and both link to each other freely. Note: these links between addon domains are NOT counted as valid backlinks for page rank purposes, but they do help search engines crawl both sites, and they improve the search engine results.

External (outbound) linking

Many will say that links away from your site are deadly, luring readers away who will never return.

I say that’s hogwash!

See, I’m Old Skool. I was on the web back in 1994, before Google, before any search engines even existed. The way to find someone on “the web” was to go to their domain, say, bigstateuniversity.edu, and add a tilde to their email username. For example, I used to be found at http://cs.utk.edu/~doolin. (You can still find links to my work there but you’ll have to pound on Google a bit.) Back then, people linked to each other. Back then, all there were on the web were people. Real people. A few universities, but mostly people. Anyone remember BOTW? In any case, when it made sense, we linked.

The key, is context.

If you’re writing an article for entertainment or education, links add incredible value to publications on the web. I still recall the feeling of being able to create hyperlinked text, not limited by footnote or endnote restrictions, where every link could be the jumping off point into a universe of fresh knowledge. From my point of view, if a link will provide my reader with more value, I’ll put in the link.

It’s very curious to me that so many bloggers link so… parsimoniously. I just read an otherwise very good article on contributing to WordPress which really could have used several more links. I suppose I could “google” for those terms, but that runs the risk of getting results different from what the author intended. Perhaps the dual whammy of easy search coupled with SEO “link juice leaking” has inhibited hyperlinks in hypertext documents. If so, that would really be a pity.

This does go a bit against the grain of received SEO opinion… linking out may “reduce” your page rank by bleeding away your “link juice.” But as even Matt Cutts explains, page rank is only one part of the story, and perhaps not the most important part.

If you’re writing compelling content, using links within your context, and to help the reader understand your content, you have nothing at all to worry about. Readers will feel compelled to read to the end of your story. They will return from their link excursion grateful for the ticket your provided.

Each relevant, interesting, information link you provide a reader gives the reader—or your prospect—another way to connect with you. If you do this honestly, provide links that reflect who you are, readers either won’t respond or will respond positively. There is little downside for negative response.

The key is High Quality Links. Deliver value to your reader.

(Of course, if you’re writing a sales page for your product or service, you don’t want to link away. That would be rude, interrupting the readers attention while you’re having a conversation of importance to both of you.)

Want a slightly different perspective? Check out “Who’s afraid of outbound links?” by Gabe Young on Free Blog Help dot Com. You have nothing to fear from helping readers.

Wikipedia: Don’t be seduced!

Wikipedia seemingly has an answer for everything! When you’re linking out, it’s just too easy to do a search on, say, Google, and use one of the top results… which is commonly Wikipedia. (Notice how I am not linking to Wikipedia here? That would be too easy!). Readers truly interested in your topic or the link will find the Wikipedia article on their own pretty fast, especially if they have any experience at all on the internet. Instead, so a little digging and find a better resource for your readers. Something your readers may not be able to find quickly.

Hat tip : to Kip Praslowicz: use Google blog search to find a relevant link on a related blog. Smart one! Thanks, Kip.

Instead of leaning all over Wikipedia, spread some of the love around. Use an online dictionary. Use Urban Dictionary for handling slang. Find some canonical articles which may be in the lower half of Google results. Often the top half of such pages is occupied Wikipedia, followed by 4,5 or 6 results which are clearly spam, followed by articles with real substance.

Tagged as: Hat tip, Linking, SEO, Unleash WordPress, Writing