How to Effectively add Links to your Blog Posts

Linking is the lifeblood of the internet. Without the ability to link, the internet would be a very difficult place to frequent. The same is true for sites and blogs, without links to expand on ideas, provide further reading and guide your readers to usefull content, a blog can become a very unwelcoming place. There are, of course, other reasons for providing thorough linking throughout your content, not least search engine optimisation and reducing bounce rates. Therefore, you should try and link to relevant content as much as possible, be it within the same site, or not.

So that’s the “why” out of the way, what about the “how”? I’ve previously covered two plugins that assist you with linking in WordPress Blogs by automatically turning certain strings of text into links in my crucial but invisible WordPress plugins post. One will automatically turn typed URLs into hyperlinks, and the other will automatically turn category names into hyperlinks. Both these plugins require very little to no maintenance and just work as advertised. I wasn’t overstating the fact when I called them crucial.

Today, I’ve added a new tool to my arsenal. While reading the excellent Daily Blog Tips blog, I came across a post on 10 Easy Ways to Improve Internal Linking. Within that post is a link to a plugin called aLinks. aLinks allows you to turn any phrase or word into a link, this makes linking to other sites, and other pages on the same site, an absolute breeze. Now, instead of having to type out the URL every time you want to link to another one of your posts, you can just type its name, and aLinks will automatically turn it into a link for you. Another factor which makes this plugin very easy to recommend is the excellent help file that comes with it, a help file which is accessible, and appropriately linked to, from the WordPress admin interface. I wish more plugins did this.   There is also a nice module implementation, so you can expand the functionality quickly and easily, but only if you need to.

I thoroughly recommend it.