Blog knowledge - The power of the internal link

I'm going to start a series of post recounting my experiences of writing on blogs and talk about some of the tactics I feel have really helped promote my blog content.

While promoting your blog content might not be seen as an important factor to you, it is to most bloggers. Knowing that someone out there in that digital void is reading your content and hopefully getting some value from it, makes all the effort worthwhile.

Comments and the value they add to your blog are invaluable, but often the only reassurance you have are the golden statistics you get on visitors and bounce rates etc.

The aim of this series is to share my findings as my blog writing progresses, in the hope that they can help you with your blog and allow you to reach a higher readership. Hopefully helping you and I improve those golden statistics.

This first post focuses on the power of the internal link and how it drives interest and improves your blogs quality and value. Encouraging people to view other internal links should reduce bounce rates on your blog.

Firstly, internal linking grows and grows in power as the size of the content on your blog grows.

It's hard to link to posts in your blog when you only have 10-20 other posts. But as you start to reach 100-200, you'll start to remember talking about subject matters before.

Delving back to your previous blog posts often finds hidden gems that you've written before, reminding yourself of the commitment you've given to your blog.

That said, at other times you find blog posts that make you shudder and you'll consider deleting them, or perhaps that's just me!

Placing links to these posts in the body copy of future posts is just one easy way to link to the posts. Try and do this in a fashion that adds value to the link itself, Google rewards good linking with relevant context.

So, if you're linking to an article on say Blogging vs Twitter, makes sure your anchor text is the relevant part of the conversation and not something like, click here.

Second, even if you've placed a link your body copy to previous posts, create a relevant links section at the bottom of the post.

This helps with a few different issues:

• A lot of people don't like to follow links whilst reading an article. They rather read the full article before considering further reading.

• It also helps illustrate that the links are to your blog and not an external source. Other than those who are savvy enough to check the status bars on the browsers whilst mousing over a link (to see where it goes), there is no nice way to achieve this.

• Additionally it allows you to add to your keyword density on page, that is if you are promoting your blog by its name, which makes sense.
  

Finally, using widgets. I'm currently working with a number of colleagues to redevelop Digital Signals, give it a face lift, it needs it.

With this face lift I intend to start using a number of internal link widgets. This can take the form of wordle's, tag clouds, popular posts, recent comments etc. There's a whole host of ideas to promote other internal blog content other than the standard archive.

While I think all blogs should clearly display an archive on their homepage, archives are not always the most usable way to encourage people to explore other relevant content on your blog.

Adding links to other relevant articles on your post communicates the commitment you've shown to blogging. The fact that you've been pursuing blog writing for a while usually indicates more experience, and hopefully with experience will come better blogging (hopefully . . .).

I've still got a lot to learn about blogging myself and I'm always wanting to learn more from others. If you've got other advice to internal linking please feel free to add it to the comments below.


Relevant links:

The URL explained - Blah, blah! Technology http://www.blahblahtech.com/2009/03/the-url-explained.html


Related links:

The benefit of comments - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/01/benefits-of-comments.html

Blogging vs Twitter/Friendfeed - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2008/12/blogging-vs-twitterfriendfeed.html

Food for better blogging - Digital Signals http://www.digital-constructions.com/blog/2009/02/food-for-better-blogging.html

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