Internal Linking For Your Blog

Build Traffic With Internal Links

Using internal links is a great way to help grow your site's relevance and your traffic.  If you have a great blog topic or an excellent post someone may decide to steal your content.  Someone also could use a feed of your blog posts on their own page.  This is a very common tactic in some niche markets where a site owner will create a main site that is an aggregate of many other sites.  It's not a bad thing, you just want to be able to traffic back to your site from those feed syndicating sites.  Some sites will just syndicate the titles of the posts and force readers to the original site.  These are great sites that will send traffic your way, but often you are competing with many other titles and content from authors within your field.  On the other hand, some sites will syndicate your entire article, so it is important to provide an option for drawing those readers back to your main site.

An example (from my main site's niche) of a great feed syndicate site that only lists the post titles and forces readers back to the original site is wowheadlines.com.  This sites shows current posts for WoW blogs and breaks them down into separate niche categories.

Often times your blog posts will appear on other people's sites as they are syndicating your every post.  If you are using internal links within your posts, then when your content gets syndicated on someone else's page, there will be an embedded link in the post content that can send the viewers back to your original site.  This is a great way to get new traffic from outside sources.  If you don't include internal links to other pages on your blog, then this opportunity to get traffic and readers from syndicated sites will be lost.  This is even more important, if the aggregate site doesn't list the original author's site in the feed syndication.  Another site could be reaping the benefits of all the hard work you put into your content.  You want to use syndicate sites to your advantage by always linking to your own pages within your content.

Internal linking also helps to spread your page rank around your site.  Linking pages with proper anchor text also helps to build relevance by helping to teach the search engines what each page is about.  Internal linking also serves to help navigate your visitors around your site.