WordPress genuine platforms now offer limitless internal link plugins for the content developers. Bearing in mind, encouraging visitors to stay on-site longer is one of the most important tasks for webmasters. And the more content a visitor consumes, the more likely they are to become fans of your website.
As an example, the Internal Link Juicer is the state-of-the-art solution for building internal links within the post content. It works by using an intelligent per-post configuration of your desired keywords. Overall, it improves your on-page SEO and your user experience (UX) by pointing out the right content for the given context.
This increases loyalty and means more social shares and conversions. But, there are SEO benefits too. And did I forget to mention that best of all, they’re all free? For instance, Google Analytics does analyze core metrics from your website. Including,
- Real-time visits,
- Audience demographics,
- Acquisition reach,
- Behavioral traffic and
- The conversion rate of Goals.
In addition to the time-on-site, these can have a big impact on your website’s position in the SERPs.
Why are Internal Link Plugins important for SEO?
Internal links help Google find, index, and understand all of the pages on your site. If you use them strategically, internal links can send page authority (also known as PageRank) to important pages. In short, internal linking is key for any site that wants higher rankings in Google.
Hence, use Keyword-Rich Anchor Text. Whereas, You can even get away with using some exact match anchor text in your internal links. (Which is a big no-no when it comes to your site’s backlinks). In fact, Google even recommends that you use keywords in your anchor text.
Inbound Links | 10 SEO Tips to Increase your Site Ranking
Therefore, with these lucrative benefits in mind, how exactly do we get visitors to stick around for longer? Above all, for great content is a must, but an intuitive, user-friendly website is just as important. By reading your content thoroughly, you need to make sure that it as easy as possible for a visitor to read too.
It’s important to realize, Internal Linking is a great way to achieve this. Whereby, internal links make it incredibly easy for visitors to move from one piece of content to the next. And if you want to create a sophisticated network of internal links, here are some of the jmexclusives team favorite Internal Link plugins for your WordPress website.
Internal Link Plugins by SEO Auto Linker
Adding internal links to a post is easy: simply click on the link button in the WordPress text editor, link to existing content, and find the article you want to link to. However, the more posts you’ve written, the more difficult it becomes to remember everything you’ve published — in other words, you might miss an ideal internal linking opportunity.
The SEO Auto Linker plugin is a fantastic solution to this problem. From the plugin settings, you are able to configure which keywords link to which URLs. Every time you use one of these keywords in an article, the plugin will automatically add the relevant link.
This makes it super-easy to build a network of internal links — you can link to external websites, too, so you can also use this plugin to add affiliate links to your content. And from the settings, you can configure how many internal links will be shown per phrase — if you use a certain keyword a lot, you won’t want a link displaying with every use.
Finally, you can use SEO Auto Linker to add new internal links to all your older posts, something many of us forget to do. As you write new articles and configure the relevant target keywords, any uses of the keyword in existing articles are automatically converted into internal links.
WP Optimize By xTraffic
The WP Optimize plugin performs a similar function to SEO Auto Linker: you can associate posts with target keywords, and the plugin automatically adds an internal link every time a keyword is used.
However, beyond this handy feature, the plugin offers quite a bit more — for a free plugin, WP Optimize has lots of functions. For a start, if you don’t have the time to set your keywords and target links, the plugin will use a related content algorithm to link to the most appropriate posts on your site.
The plugin will also automatically optimize your images for SEO by adding alt tags and reducing the file size — reducing file size will help your website load more quickly. Finally, if you are worried about people stealing your images, WP Optimize can also add a watermark to your images in bulk.
RB Internal Links
WordPress makes it simple to configure the structure of your URLs — just use the permalink settings from the WordPress dashboard. This can be used for SEO purposes, as well as creating clean-looking URLs.
If you need to change your permalink structure, you can do this with just a few clicks, and this automatically adjusts all existing URLs, too. Of course, there is one problem with this: your internal links won’t update, and will continue to point towards the old URL. In other words, all your internal links will break, and too many 404 errors can damage your SEO performance.
If you want to avoid internal linking issues down the line, it is well worth installing the RB Internal Links plugin. The plugin uses a shortcode to point towards the current URL of the target page — if the URL changes, so too do the target URL in the shortcode. The plugin also makes it easier to find the post/page you want to link to, too, by allowing you to browse existing posts by category.
WordPress Popular Posts Plugin
What keeps a visitor on your blog? Well, amongst other things, the quality of your content. With this in mind, if you want people to stick around for longer, show them the best your site has to offer — the content other visitors love.
For this, you will need a popular posts Internal Link Plugins — check out the WordPress Popular Posts plugin. The plugin lets you add a simple popular post section to your website, where you can internally link to your best content — you can also link to pages, and custom post types.
Additionally, you can add a popular posts section to the sidebar using a dedicated widget, or anywhere on the page using a shortcode. You can choose to display a thumbnail next to the post titles, as well as how many posts to include.
You can sort popularity based on page views or the number of comments left. Because these factors are influenced by when a post was published. Whereby, older articles have had more time to attract views and comments. In reality, you can also set the time frame to be analyzed.
Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP)
It’s no surprise that many major websites include related content areas below their articles — if you can help a visitor find topics that interest them, they are more likely to stick around longer. YARPP is the most popular related content plugin, with over 3 million downloads.The plugin allows you to display related posts, pages, and custom post types below your content, or in any widget area using a dedicated widget. You are able to configure how many related posts to display, as well as whether you want to include a thumbnail image next to the title.
The plugin uses an advanced algorithm to pick out the closely related content from across your website: post titles, body content, tags, categories, and custom taxonomies are all analyzed. The algorithm can also be customized if you want to exclude certain elements from the analysis.
YARPP is not without faults, though: caching problems have caused several major hosting providers to blacklist the plugin.
Takeaway,
Above all, it is important to make it as easy as possible for visitors to move around your website. Not to mention, key site metrics like bounce rate, page views, and time on website will improve. Whereas, this is one of the many benefits of using internal linking. And, as visitors consume more of your content, they are more likely to become loyal fans.
That means more repeat visitors and more social shares. In addition to more conversions all because of a few free plugins! I hope you enjoyed reading more about Internal Link Plugins for your WordPress site. But, if you’ll need more help or support, please feel free to share them in the comments section or Contact Us.
