Interlinking of blog posts is one very important parameter of on-page SEO. It improves the contextual score of your blog and also helps in ranking higher in the search engine.
I have seen many bloggers rely heavily on related posts section for interlinking, which is not the best solution. To make your on-Page SEO and on-site SEO strong, you should have proper internal linking between your blog posts.
In WordPress, there are various ways to interlink your blog posts, and in this guide, I will share all the best available methods that you can use right away.
Most of the solutions listed below are free and only one of them is paid, which I personally use for all my work.
Before I share WordPress interlinking solutions, let me quickly share what are the direct benefits of interlinking your articles:
Crawling and Deep-Indexing: Interlinking helps search engine bots to crawl and index your articles effectively.
Bounce rate and more page views: Right interlinking helps reduce the bounce rate to a great extent. The only key here is, your linking should be relevant.
Passes link juice: It passes link juice from one page to another. This is one reason, I highly recommend to link from your old articles to a new one.
On page SEO benefit: Interlinking also helps in on-page SEO.
Now, let’s look at all the available solution for WordPress bloggers to interlink their blog posts like a pro.
Best WordPress Interlinking Plugins and tricks
1. Linkwhisper
Linkwhisper is the most advanced interlinking WordPress plugin available in the market. The beauty of the plugin is, once you install it, within seconds it will scan all of your WordPress websites and start suggesting you words that you could link to.
I have never found any similar plugin which helps in improving the internal link of WordPress.
2. Interlinks Manager
This is the modern auto internal linking plugin for WordPress which is also Gutenberg ready. Interlinks Manager plugin offers the following features which you would require in 2020:
Calculate the link juice
Set words to automatic link to link of your choice
Include/Exclude custom post type
Suggest internal links in the post editing section (This is super useful)
Track the internal links
Export data to CSV
3. SEO Smart Link Premium
This plugin is for the automatic interlinking of blog articles. It automatically links your taxonomies (tags and categories) and you can set your own rules for automatic interlinking. For example, you can choose to link all articles with “Make money online” in them to link to a specific blog post. Such a command will automatically interlink old and future posts containing the word “Make money online” with your specific link.
Similarly, you can have unlimited linking and especially for blogs with huge content, this plugin is a time-saver. The premium version of the plugin also offers the caching feature so that your blog doesn’t slow down. This is a paid plugin and costs about $149.
4. Wordpress default search and interlink
WordPress also offers a default feature to let you quickly interlink your blog posts. Whenever you select a text and click on the hyperlink to add a link, you can search for your published post from there and link it directly to the anchor text. This is a default feature of WordPress and it’s very useful. Update: Yoast premium can also be used to improve internal linking. However, it’s not automated but worth looking at.
Conclusion: Which is the best plugin for interlinking blog posts?
I currently use a combination of Linkwhisper + Yoast SEO Premium to manage internal linking. Linkwhisper lacks the auto-internal linking, and this is one feature that I stopped using since last algorithm update. The manual internal linking offers better relevancy and Linkwhisper matching engine makes it easier to do just that.
There are a few more plugins that are available, but these are the best solutions that you can use for WordPress interlinking. Do let me know what strategy you follow for blog posts interlinking.
Don’t forget to share this video with others, as it would help them to understand the importance of interlinking and how to do it.
