When you sit down to write a blog post you usually focus on the topic at hand, right? While focusing on your current topic is exactly what you should be doing, there’s another important aspect of blogging that you need to take into consideration. Along with your current post you should be thinking about an internal linking strategy.

Although an internal linking strategy may never have crossed your mind it happens to be one of the most important strategies for bloggers and webmasters alike. Your internal linking strategy could be the strategy that makes or breaks you. The search engines can either look at your site as a valuable information source or as an unimportant information source. What it comes down to is; which do you prefer? You want to be seen as a valuable information source, right? Isn’t this why you put so much time and effort into your blog or website?

What happens here is that sites without internal linking may actually be undervalued because they don’t have internal links. If you write a blog on a focused topic and not just ramblings, then this should be no problem at all.

What should you link to?

  • Previous blog posts that are relevant to your current blog post
  • Your domain name

How should you link to your previous posts?

  • Use keywords that appear naturally in you current post and hyper-link them to your previous post
  • If you can’t use the exact keywords you would like because they don’t appear naturally in your current post then you can still use a particular keyword or keyword set by making use of the “alt” attribute; by using the “alt” attribute you can place your keywords there and tell the search engines what the link is about

Why is this important?

  • You are telling the search engines that a particular post you had earlier is relevant to what you are currently talking about
  • You are telling the search engines that your blog or website is important

If you’re haven’t been thinking about an internal linking strategy then don’t worry, it’s not too late. You can go back through your posts and link to all the relevant posts that you can find. This may take a little time but the results you will see in the search engines can be dramatic.

While search engine traffic may not be the “be all end all” it can have an impact on the amount of users and readers that find your website on the Internet. Users and readers are the “be all end all.” I know that I’ve found plenty of great resources through search engines and without these strategies in place I may have never found some of the sites that I visit on a daily basis.