3 replies to this topic

[kflatla]

Hi everyone -

I've recently switched careers and have spent the last couple of months building my new website and developing content (copywriting/blogging/sharing/etc).

Regarding internal linking:

What I've been doing is simply using the WordPress tool that suggests related posts and pages. i.e. the pop up screen when you select anchor text and click the link button. From there, I just select the post or page that makes the most sense, sometimes it's another blog post and sometimes it's a page offering my services or some educational content about how to use my services (e.g. there's a Q&A page I feel is key content on my site that I like to direct traffic to if I can).

I really haven't given much thought to how I'm linking within each "silo" or topic/category. Rather, I'm just thinking about how to guide my reader in the most effective manner

Should I be more "strategic" about my internal linking? Or is that a bunch of nonsense in the "post-Panda" era? OR worse, can I hurt my rankings by linking this way?

Trying to get back up to speed on what's what in the SEO world! (Hi Jill!)

Thanks in advance,
kf

[chrishirst]

I really haven't given much thought to how I'm linking within each "silo" or topic/category.

That's the best way.

Not thinking about means you are more likely to come up with the most obvious and usually the simplest and "natural" solution.

[Jill]

It depends. If all you're doing is related posts, you may not be having a clear and logical structure where all your posts can easily be found and indexed.

To me, it's usually important to have some sort of categorical structure (within some form of global navigation) with each category having its own landing page with a sentence or two describing the types of posts within that category.

[kflatla]

Thanks both.

I have tweaked my blog structure a bit since yesterday, so now the categories are a bit more intuitive. i.e. I renamed the categories and also removed the "category base" from my WP permalink structure. So now the different types of links look like this:

mywebsite.com
mywebsite.com/some-page
mywebsite.com/blog
mywebsite.com/yellow-category
mywebsite.com/yellow-category/some-post
etc etc

And within each blog post I might link once or twice to other pages or posts within the site but I haven't really been thinking about "topic silos" at all. That was what I was a bit worried about. So within one blog post, for example, I might link to a Page and also to another blog post, either within that category (silo) or not.

Good tip regarding the logical categories though. I hadn't created category landing pages/meta yet so I took care of that today.

Karri