31DBBB Day 7: Interlink your Old Blog Posts
This is Day 7 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a group project we are doing together in an attempt to improve our blogs and help each other become better bloggers. You can read more about it and still sign-up to participate here. Please subscribe to our RSS Feed to stay updated on the project.
One problem that many blog have is that they are only “one-page deep,” meaning that there is little incentive to go beyond the homepage. Today we are going to spend some time interlinking our older blog posts to remedy this common problem. Thank you to all of you who participated on the first week, we are getting some good participation and discussion back and forth as I initially hoped. Let’s keep up the effort and I hope everyone is having a good time while taking steps to improve their blogging.
- Week 1: Read about the first week of 31DBBB
- Day 6 (Monday): Write a Link Post
- Day 7 (Tuesday): Interlink your Old Blog Posts
- Day 8 (Wednesday): Join a Forum and Start Participating
- Day 9 (Thursday): Come Up with 10 Post Ideas
- Day 10 (Friday): Update a Key Page on Your Blog
Why Interlink?
- Better reader experience: The primary reason of interlinking is to improve the reader’s experience by allowing him to flow to related posts that he/she may find interesting. By doing so, you are increasing the chance that the reader will be satisfied after visiting your blog, making it more likely that he will be a repeat visitor
- Deeper navigation: Interlinking allows your readers to move deeper into your blog instead of staying on that first level page (the homepage or the first page they landed on from referral). This increases the chance that your visitors will spend more time exploring your site which is probably one of your primary goal as the blog owner
- SEO: Interlinking allows crawl bots to explore your site in depth, allowing for better indexing of your blog’s content.
How to Interlink?
This page contains numerous example of how to interlink. You can notice at the top of the page that I have interlinked to previous related posts, notably yesterday’s 31DBBB post as well last Friday’s. At the end of the post, you can see the “Related Posts” section which lists 5 related posts (automatically). Finally, the most common and effective way is to link mid-post by selecting a keyword and linking it to the related page. This can be seen in the first paragraph of this post.
Assignment
Spend 15 minutes interlinking some of your related older posts. Of course, once you are done, please come back and let us know what you thought about today’s lesson and assignment!
Discussion
- What are your thoughts on interlinking your content?
- If you are already interlinking, do you interlink with every post or just your most popular ones? How might taking a different approach improve your blog?
28 Comments
I’m on it, chief.
I interlink – sometimes I over-interlink, I feel – xD but interlinking is very important to create a sense of hmmm, how would you call that… it’s like making a world. For example, while reading Harry Potter, you get this reference from the first book on the series. Suddenly, it’s just so much richer because it connects it to somewhere else. And you go, “Oh, yeah… that” either when you remember it, or when you finally take the time to read it.
I don’t have a way to check which one is my most interlinked post, but I recently linked to my post on Chick Flicks. I always linked to it when talking about chick flicks in a non-negative light. xD
Plugins for “similar posts” and/or “most popular in such tag/category” are helpful for a quick way to interlink.
I’ve actually never thought of doing this at all but I might try this now. I’ve always been more label heavy focusing on specific labels that, if you click on, will take you through all sorts of posts. But interlinking is a very smart idea and I will have to do it.
I’m with Travis. I look for good labels to find more posts on a topic. I might try adding the related posts that are automatically generated. At least they provide some humor. I’ll go back and both update my own labels (I get lazy using them) and do some good interlinking, particularly the Memes I’ve been doing.
Labels and tags are great but links are much more visible and immediately actionable. Labels and tags usually end up being footnotes at the end of the post so most people tend to become “blind” to those.
Definitely worth linking back to older posts, not only because new readers won’t have read them, but to (as pointed above) bring up related posts. My favourite vahicle for them is Actors (linking previous films) or cliches / common observations (linking all posts tagged with that to date – Blu Rays, Bitchslap, Headshot etc)
Only downside is that although I try to add a handful of links into each new post, hardly anybody ever clicks on them!
I used to spend a painstaking amount of time on linking older posts to newer ones, but I stopped doing it thinking no one was ever actually going back to those older posts. I still do it now and again, as I have considerably more interactive site now to see. I’ll follow the assignment and do one or two this week, perhaps if I have time even rock one out today just for you and give it a second run.
I do this A TON. It really does help, but I’m never sure how to read my WP stats page because the clicks is kind of spotty on places within my own blog.
LinkWithin helps quite a bit. I would recommend it to anyone who can install it on their blog.
I’ve always tried to interlink my old posts but moreso for the sake of brevity as it’s usually referring to a point I made a while ago. I’m also into the habit of interlinking specifically to older posts that I like (our first award show – The Castastrophies – is still a favourite of mine and I try to link to it whenever I can. Like here… BAM! http://castalavista.wordpress.com/2009/12/25/the-castastrophies-2009/) but I guess I could do a lot more in terms of making it a regular thing.
I really like the idea of linking back to older posts involving the same actor and maybe more than just linking back to old posts, I need to start thinking of ways to interlink them through the text in a post (and then link that).
For example, if I were to review a movie with someone who’s been in a lot this year I may just happen to reference another movie they’ve done and link to that if I wrote about it. What I need to start doing is MAKING SURE I link to it, even if that means changing the content a little to work a point in.
I’m totally with Amy on this – it shows we know our own content but also helps build and develop this big web of er… posts. It can always make it easier for people to catch the gems they might otherwise have missed.
I’m notorious for doing this, sometimes I’m afraid I do it too much. But hey I figure no harm done in case people miss this or that post. Can’t always rely on WordPress’ related links though I find that gets some traffic as well.
Oh, on a related note. What does everyone think about re-tweeting older posts?? Annoying or good idea?
Only if it’s timely, I think. If there’s something in the news or something you can tie it to. Otherwise, I think Twitter is loaded with a lot of background noise and it might not be so effective.
Good point, Steve. I have only done it a couple of times but I should do it more often on timely topic, especially if it’s trending.
I sometime retweet a second time usually 6 to 12 hours later but that’s pretty much my limit. The problem with Twitter is that it is so fleeting so I don’t think retweeting 2 or 3 times hurts in any way.
I agree with Castor…when you tweet something it will have disappeared off most users screens within the hour…sometimes less. Retweeting is fine in my book – try to chaneg the titles of the tweets or pose questions that have something to do with the post you’re linking to.
I will retweet a movie review when the movie is released on DVD or if it is nominated for an award.
That’s what I find my site is about… Why the heck have I been writing all this time if my old stuff is just gonna collect internet dust? The challenge is remembering what you’ve got to link to – I think I might do a little search and see if I can find a WordPress app that can help with that, without being too much like ad-ware.
Exactly Steve! I think we can all do a better job of pointing people to older posts, especially the ones that were popular in the past.
I have done this in the past but I looking back, I have not used it to its maximum effectiveness. One thing that was great about this assignment is that as I went through some of my old posts I noticed many invalid and broken links that I was able to fix!
Awesome! Glad to hear this helped you fixed some broken links as well.
I’m back. For this interlink assignment I ended up customizing my theme to include related/random posts.
Okay here’s mine! Castor, thanks for visiting the couch today. I’m really enjoying interacting with everyone here and finding all these cool new movie blogs.
http://colleeniescouch.blogspot.com/2010/08/tell-me-your-favorite.html
Oh, and this is what I posted today. I was hoping for more interlinking, but it turns out I hadn’t written reviews about the film I thought I had… A problem I shall remedy in due course…
http://www.thefilmcynics.com/blog/?p=4598
interlinks are a good idea. it is hard getting people to delve into your back catalogue. your average web punter however i find doesnt bother clicking them that much
I often interlink my old posts. But I tried something different for this lesson. I created a landing page that interlinks some of my best posts. I use it as the URl when I guest post or comment. It is also a good way to measure how many people click on your site when you comment or write guest posts.
Thank You Landing Page: http://justchickflicks.com/thank-you/
I also have a similar ABOUT page: http://justchickflicks.com/home which I will update soon.
Hey everyone!
I interlink as a habit for search engines, readers and me. I try to let to know the readers that there is much more material on the site that they might be interested in, google loves me more and I am reminded of what I have written so far. My latest interlinked post is the review for Serious Moonlight – it features links to other stuff on the starring actors and at the end of the post, I featured a list of everything else I wrote on them. Here it is:
http://pinartarhan.com/blog/serious-moonlight-starring-timothy-hutton-and-meg-ryan/
After doing a little digging through the past, I managed to create 5 new trackbacks, and I’m still working on building up some more. I also found a cool WordPress app that can add some Wikipedia style interlinking to posts on the same subject. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/interlinks/
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