In my opinion one of the more powerful and underutilized tools of a blog or website is the ability to tag your pages and posts. That said, effectively using  tags isn’t easy or straightforward. In this post I’ll take you through some examples of how to use tags and get the most out of them, the pitfalls to watch out for, and some advanced strategies you can use with them.

First we need to take a step back and understand that there are several ways you can arrange your website/blog. The first is by subject, which most blog and CMS platforms call “categories.” The second is by date, which occurs as most blog/cms systems put things in year, month, and date groupings. A third is by tagging, which consists of the notes or descriptions you put on your posts or pages.

All of these different classification methods bring about one of the hallmark problems of blogs and CMS’s: duplicate content. Let’s assume that you publish one page. That page will exist on the page, but also on the category archive page, year archive page, year-month archive page, year-month-day archive page, and the archive page for any tag that you attach to the page/post. This can create issues as the search engines have to figure out what page they should really list in the SERP’s. First I suggest blocking all of the date archives from being indexed by using the “noindex” directive in the robots.txt (note Google is the only search engine who currently supports this command). I also use the “noindex/follow” robots tag on each of the date archive pages. Basically we are telling the robots don’t put these pages in the SERP’s but follow through and get the pages. We go with the exact same settings for the tag pages. If you are running wordpress you can use the Robots Meta plugin from Joost de Valk to get this done. This only leaves us with the duplicate issue on category and individual pages. To combat this problem, only show limited sections of your posts on the category pages. The thesis theme has this functionality built in. If you aren’t using thesis, you can use the teaser plugin to get a similar result or remember to use the “more” tag 100% of the time.

OK now that we’ve got the duplicate content issue resolved, why would anyone want to use tags in the first place? Can’t you achieve the same results with categories? Yes and no. Here’s an example of how I would use categories and tags: let’s say you have a celebrity website with categories like “baby bump,” “fashion,” “news,” “rumors,” etc. You are also going to have celebrities who are always in the news like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. What I would do is create tags for each celebrity and, whenever I did a post about the celebrity, I’d tag it with his or her name.

Another example. You have a travel website with categories like “adventure travel,” “family travel,” “skiing,” “cruises,” and so on. I would set up tags for countries, states, or cities, like Bahamas, France, or Colorado. You could have a white water rafting page in the adventure travel category tagged with Colorado. You could have a Skiing in Vail post in the skiing category also tagged with Colorado. You can also have a family travel article about visiting the Museum of Science and nature and Botanic Gardens in Colorado.  Those three separate articles would be interconnected by using the Colorado tag.

Here’s where the magic of tagging comes into play. If you use the cross linker plugin,  you can set it up to automagically link any word like “Colorado” to the tag page for Colorado. So if the person reading any of the three Colorado articles clicks on “Colorado,” they visit the tag page and see all of your posts about Colorado. I’ve found that in-posts links get much higher click throughs than “tag” links at the end of an article. You could set it up the same way for Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, or any other word/tag you used. What this does is create an alternate navigation path that’s both really useful for readers and keeps your content exposed to the search engine spiders. You could link the word individually as you write each post, but I find it easier to manage a website when I cut down the maintenance wherever I can.

Another advantage is that tagging is a much more effective way to choose which ads to display. If I’m only using categories like “family travel,” it’s hard to know which ad to serve. Do I use Disneyland tickets, family cruises, or city based Go Cards? However with tagging I can be much more specific by only serving cruise advertising to the pages/posts with the “cruise” tag. If you want to get really specific you can have general “cruise” tag and a separate ”family cruise” tag. You just have to decide how granular you want to get.

There are some downsides to all of this, of course. You have to maintain your tags because they have a tendency to get out of hand, especially if you have more than one author, and they play fast and loose with the rules. For example you could end up with “cruise,” “cruises,” and “cruising,” which really are all the same thing and should only have one tag. A secondary problem that can take things off the track is capitalization. With wordpress all of the following URL’s will have the same content:

http://example.com/tag/word/

http://example.com/tag/WORD/

If you’re blocking the tag pages from being indexed it’s not a huge issue. But it can come into play with an advanced tactic I’ll be talking about next, so I bring it up now as a problem to be aware of. To be honest the tools for administering and editing tags is pretty limited. The best one I’ve found if Simple tags. It isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done.

Advanced Tag  and Cross Link Utilization

Using tagging this way creates a problem: you squander internal anchor text on pages you are blocking from the index. In the examples above, you would certainly want a page about Colorado to appear in the index, but maybe not the tag for a small city with little value and traffic. In the example above you would set up the word “Colorado” to link to “http://example.com/tag/colorado/”. However, what if you set the cross link to a normal page like “http://example.com/colorado/” instead of the tag page? Then you could create a page with some editorial copy, install the EXEC PHP plugin, and use it to issue  a WP Query and automatically list posts tagged with Colorado. You will need to know PHP to make that happen, but it’s not too hard.

Another trick. If I’m creating “head and tail” content, I’ll set up the cross link to point to the “http://example.com/keyword/” page/post. However, if there isn’t any content there yet (ie only the “tail” pieces of content exist) I’ll use the redirection plugin to temporarily redirect to the tag page. I’ll take the redirect down once the “head” is written. This can get kind of tricky, so you should only use it if you are confident about what you are doing.

To recap and bring everything together, here’s what you need to remember:

• By using tags you can provide a more granular way to break down the content on your website.
• This break down can provide alternate navigation paths to your content for both humans and search engines.
• This break down becomes more useful to humans if you link words/tags within the main body of the content.
• This break down is extremely effective for serving very targeted advertising or affiliate links.
• Care should be taken to minimize duplicate content and duplicate/similar tags

Lastly one of the original purposes of tagging was to help blog search engines like Technorati understand your content; however, to be honest, that value is so non-existent it’s really not worth mentioning. When was the last time Technorati or ice rocket brought you any traffic?
photo credit: Mykl Roventine

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Schlock writing is bad. Schlock writing is bad because it is uninteresting. By uninteresting, I mean that writing in a schlocky manner is generic. Schlock writing is styleless and schlock is flat.

If you just read that introduction and didn’t jump off a bridge, you’re probably a schlock writer. Go hang yourself with some piano wire.

While those may be some harsh words, at least they take a position! The sentences vary in rhythm; the vocabulary radiates intensity and aims for precision. The verbs “being” (is/are/was) and having (has/have) only appear as necessary. They don’t burden every damn sentence.

Strunk and White’s book, The Elements of Style, codified grammar and certain key ideas of good writing. It demonstrates the concision it advocates, for example.

Recently, I borrowed a book entitled Spunk and Bite, a play on “Strunk and White,” as The Elements of Style is also known.

It’s a great value.

Schlock writers – at least, those who lacked wire, earlier – would double their pay rate instantly if they bought the book and integrated its lessons. Personally, while my grammar is strong, I admit that my writing’s usual degree of sizzle doesn’t excite many readers’ palates. Spunk and Bite’s helped me with:

• Creating original images (dismembered infants instead of puppy-killing or baby-eating);
• Explaining why certain jokes are funny;
• Using adverbs appropriately, which clarifies the success of many linkbait titles I’ve seen.
• Eliminating wishy-washy words like “can,” “may,” “might,” “should,” etc.
• Sending neutrality to hell and choosing a side. I’m not writing an encyclopedia, after all.

And I haven’t even finished the book!

Schlock. Powered by Google.

Compare that energetic writing with the tedious truism of this lead I read. “Every year, many people plan their vacations.” You don’t say? Well after that shocker, I’m compelled to read the rest of your written-for-search-engine squalor.

Style

When people complain about Demand Media being a ‘content factory / mill / sweatshop,’ a large part of that is in reference to the total absence of style found in its content. Read Write Web accurately calls it ‘fast food content’ because it fills you up without giving you the substantial quality you need.

Substance

Which leads to my next point: schlock shouts with superficiality. There’s no research that goes into it. That’s also why Demand Media and others focus on the long tail, since that’s where schlock is more likely to succeed. The short tail is more competitive, which leads serious businesses to invest in researched, deep articles penned with flair. eHow sticks out like a sore thumb when compared with that kind of content.

Note: Wire content is also superficial in this way, though it tends to have slightly more style. The point is that Made For Adsense (MFA) sites aren’t the only ones who skimp on research.

My friend Rena writes in defence of such content,

“Some people say that in the world of search engine optimization there will be more low quality content. Sorry, I think it’s the opposite. There’s always been bad content. There have always been middle men who try to connect you to content, and whose interests aren’t totally aligned with yours. Google’s not perfect, but they’re probably the best company we’ve ever had at connecting people to quality content. If Demand Media is really low quality, their success on Google will be temporary.”

If we’re honest about it, SEO drives demand for content of all varying degress of quality. At the absolute low-end is autogenerated blackhat content. Marginally above that is schlock, which includes most so-called “SEO copywriting,” (code for “I can include keywords in my title and content). And then you have linkbait in varying degrees of quality, which goes pretty high. It just depends if the intended audience is search engines or humans…

Subscriptions

If you haven’t been paying attention, more and more content is being excluded from search engines with subscription models. In internet marketing alone we have subscription products from Aaron Wall, SEOmoz, We Build Pages, PPC-Coach, SEL, SEW and Problogger, just to name a few.

This trend towards subscriptions for premium content illustrates that:

a) Producing high quality content can be profitable, so long as you don’t rely on ads.

b) Increasingly, the [commercially-created] information available online for free will be of mediocre quality. While Wikipedia’s contributors count thieves and fools amongst them, its noncommercial nature has resulted in lots of high quality, free articles.

c) If Wikipedia means substantial, free, short-tail articles (Wikipedia’s tail is no longer than stub…), and MFA factories mean superficial longtail, then I conclude that deep, commercial content is only going to be available for a fee. So don’t expect search engines to succeed at covering the deep web anytime soon, short of a new business model for it.

d) Developing style as a writer adds value to your work, and that value will grow over time as more schlock gets pumped out daily.

e) Non-authority based algorithms and other content middle men will rise up to channel attention towards worthy content.
photo credit: englishsnow

Gab Goldenberg writes a non-schlock advanced SEO blog, with articles on topics like finding competitors’ conversion rates. He specializes in buying text links, and can be reached at Gab@seoroi.com .

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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If you watched any of the congressional hearings about the newspaper industry where Marissa Mayer testified one of the concepts she brought up is Living URL’s. Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up on it on Search Engine Land. The basic concept is a story lives at a single URL and gets added to/edited/updated over time (the way wikipedia articles currently do). I took a stab at how to get from here to there in the comments, but after putting a little more thought behind it I’ve got another idea.

A word of warning this is an experiment in progress and should not be taken as solid, tested, or proven SEO best practices, your mileage may vary and if something breaks or goes haywire you have been warned.

OK so part of the problem is google news needs/wants a unique URL for each news story, especially if the facts have changed significantly that a new version of the story has to be written, which let’s be honest is the way a lot of news is reported/done. However this is in direct opposition to the “living URL” concept, so what I’m trying to accomplish is a workaround that is somewhat stable, and fits both conditions.

• Publish a story under a unique URL
• As the content becomes “aged” move it to “living URL”
• If new content need to be created repeat leaving the old/historical post in tact

If you’ll notice one of my goals isn’t to update the page, but just relocate and add the new content as needed. IMHO rewriting every time new data become available just ins’t workable. You can see an example of this in place on the Survivor pages on wikipedia ( grasp the concept people don’t get distracted by the content)

I decided to experiment with one of my more popular posts, the one on wordpress SEO Plugins. The first post I did was in 2006, and it ranked in the top 3, however it became outdated, and people kept asking for a new version. Eventually in 2008 I wrote one.  However the older post had more links so it always ranked higher, so I put up a note saying this post was old go here (much like Danny’s California Wildfire’s post). It wasn’t elegant but it got the job done. When I was looking around for something to experiment with the living URL’s on my wordpress SEO plugins seemed to be the perfect test. So I took these to pages and combined the content in reversed chronological order :

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/seo-plugins-for-wordpress/
http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/seo-plugins-for-wordpress-part-ii/

I put the combined content on a new page and set up 301 redirects to this page:

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo-plugins-wordpress/

At the time this post was written the 301’s haven’t taken affect for [wordpress SEO plugins] as the old post still shows. The primary reason is a technical issue which is worth sharing. I use WP cache to keep things running smoothly here. While it has a setting to “clear the cache when you publish new posts” it doesn’t seem to be working properly with scheduled posts, which 90% of the posts here are. So I had the set up the 301’s but because I didn’t clear the cache googlebot was still getting the old versions and not the redirect, good to know.

So right now this remains an experiment in progress, but is a concept I think you should watch going forward.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress SEO: How to Create Living URL’s

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For this post we’re going to be taking  look at the optimal permalink and URL structures for wordpress. There are a lot of different options, and there isn’t a one size fits all answer, however there are definitely better and worse choices you can make.

Out of the box wordpress is configured like this

http://example.com?p=123

This really isn’t a permalink structure, it’s a parameter based format with “123″ being the post number. While all major search engines can crawl and index this it’s generally not an optimal setup. From an SEO perspective you miss the opportunity to give the search engines some keywords, and from a user experience you miss the opportunity to entice them with an information scent that they are on the right track. For example lets assume you were looking for hotels in Kentucky which URL gives you a clue you might find the information your wanted on the page:

http://example1.com?p=1234

http:// example2.com/kentucky-hotels/

Another common implementation involves putting some or all of the date in the post URL, like these two examples:

http://example.com/2009/09/16/sample-post/
http://example.com/20090916-sample-post/

The first example creates a heirarchy based on year, day, month, this is really unneccesary in most situations. If you are going to add words/numbers to your url’s they should have a reason and/or keyword value. Unless the date is important to the majority of the keywords or terms you are trying to rank for, they are decoration. In fact if you publish a lot of evergreen content, having the date may work against you. Many users have a bias for “new” content, and are more likely to click something newer over something older (I use date based hooks to stop showing the date in the text on older posts). In the second example you aren’t creating a directory structure but you are including the date. This is less dangerous, but if you change your production schedule and the date of publication, you may create some 404 errors if posts were interlinked, so again I’d avoid using it, unless you have a really good reason.

Another common implementation involves categories like this:

http://example.com/baking/apple-pies/

On the surface this implementation looks ok, but there are some downsides, for example if you like to put posts in two categories your post can exist at two URL’s like:

http://example.com/baking/apple-pies/
http://example.com/dessert/apple-pies/

The problem is BOTH url’s will work, the second is wordpress chooses which is the “primary” one, not you. Another disadvantage is if you decide to rename/consolidate/change your categories you’ve got a massive 301 project on your hands. However one advantage of this set up is that you can exclude some directories via robots.txt file. A variation of this technique is :

http://example.com/baking/1234/

Unless you are going to have a massive number of posts, or posts with very similar titles (you may have 15 different apple pie recipes for example) I’d opt for the keyword over the post number.

One last combination I’d like to look at is :

http://example.com/post-title/

The advantage of this configuration is it’s very short and has keywords, however if you have more than one post with the same name, wordpress will automatically add a number onto the end like this:

http://example.com/post-title-2/

This isn’t horrible but something to keep in the back of your mind. Something to be aware of using this strategy, you won’t be able to exclude files by directory in the robots file, you’ll need do it by single post or use the meta data. One additional bit of information I’d like to throw into the mix is consideration for google news. If you ever think there might be the remote possibility you’ll want to get into google news add a unique 3 digit number into the structure, I prefer to append the post number after the page title (words at the front have more KWD value so put the place holder numbers at the end):

http://example.com/post-title-567/

You could use the date instead of the number, just be sure to consider how changing publishing date can affect other links (like if an embargo is broken and you decide to publish early too, linked posts might be broken).

My recommendations are, post title & post number followed by category & post title, here are few other points to keep in mind:

• Try to stay in the 3-5 word range whenever possible, including the category
• Eliminate stop words whenever possible
• use your URL to incorporate KWD variations

PS: having done more than my fair share of .asp and .html to php migrations I always leave the file extensions off, there are workarounds, but I have a strong personal bias to do something once and do it right …

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress SEO: How to Choose a Permalink Structure

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When you run wordpress or any other blog for that matter, chances are your blog is getting scraped, and re-used without your permission. In this post I’ll show you how you can use this to your advantage to build links with the anchor text of your choice.

The first step you need to take is to make sure you are publishing a full feed. I know this sounds counterintuitive, as publishing a full feed will actually encourage more people to scrape your feed, but that’s exactly what you want to happen.

Next you’ll need the RSS Footer plugin from Joost de Valk. By default the plugin links back to your home page with the name of your blog, and back to the individual post with the post title as the anchor text. This helps the search engines figure out who is the source of the blog post.

However you can take this plugin to a whole new level by also adding in links to different parts of your blog (or another website) with the anchor text that you put in. Initially I used this plugin in test mode to help me rank for the term [seo blog]. Once I had established that worked as proof of concept it was on to something more competitive. I’m now using it help me rank for the phrase [seo consultant].

Some important aspects of using this strategy, you don’t want to leave the anchor text, links, or surrounding text in place to long, you want to change it somewhere between every 30-90 days. This helps your backlink profile look more natural, and helps the scrapers from filtering out your links with pattern matching. Second go ahead and use it to build links for commercial terms, but don’t be greedy about it. Stuffing it full of  30 links pretty much shines a big spotlight on what you are doing, keeping it down to to 2-4 links keeps it from attracting too much attention.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress SEO: How to Use RSS and Scrapers to Build Links

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In recent weeks wordpress security, or more correctly the lack of wordpress security has been getting a lot of attention. While most people consider this a site maintenance issue, it has implications that affect your SEO efforts, in this post I’ll explain why, and look at some things you can do to protect yourself, and reduce the damage.

From a security standpoint wordpress has always been a piece of swiss cheese, with lots of security holes in it. As wordpress grows in popularity it’s attracting the attention of hackers at an alarming level. In June of 2009 wordpress released version 2.8.0, four months later we’re at wordpress 2.8.4, that’s four interim security related updates in four months. While wordpress has always been very quick to issue patches, they have done very little to prevent any of these hacks from happening in the first place. In this author’s opinion this represents nothing less than gross incompetence on wordpress’s part. Even more tragic is that this is a top down failure on the part of the entire wordpress development team, and isn’t likely to change anytime soon, so it’s imperative you understand the problem and all of it’s implications.

From a pure SEO perspective, the optimal wordpress setup is to use wordpress as a subfolder in the main site (http://example.com/blog), as this allows you to consolidate any inbound link equity into your main domain, increasing your overall trust and authority scores. From a security standpoint this is the most dangerous as many publishers will use the same database for wordpress as they do for their main domain customer, product, and transaction records. If  login or access to the admin panel is comprimised, the hacker has access to all of your data. All they need to do is install the PHP MyAdmin plugin and they have full access to your database records to copy, modify, or delete at will, scary I know. Depending on the level of the compromise the hacker may also have access to your file system, to copy, modify or delete your entire website, even more scary.

The slightly suboptimal SEO implementation, consists of placing wordpress on a subdomain (http://blog.example.com) . The link equity is still shared with the main domain, but it’s not as effective as a subfolder is. From a security standpoint you can isolate your subdomain more effectively than a subfolder. The truly paranoid can even have the subdomain and database on a completely different server or hosting company by changing an A-Name record. With this type of implementation you’ve traded a lot of link equity for a lot of increased security.

The complete security zealots can go with a blog on a completely different domain (http://exampleblog.com) with almost zero chance of  a wordpress hack influencing or compromising your main database or website. However this implementation is only useful in very few SEO situations. With this setup you have sacrificed almost all of the SEO value in the name of security.

Is it is possible to retain the SEO value, without completely sacrificing security, here are my tips on how to do it.

Backups: Ok technically backups aren’t part of security, but if something does go wrong, backup are your safety net. I use wp-DB-backups, to send a backup of all of my important database tables to an email account every night. This way I can roll back to whatever day I want. At the end of every month I archive the backups from the 1st and the 15th and delete the rest.

Database Isolation: You should always have your wordpress database isolated from all of your other databases, with different usernames and passwords. Worst case scenario the only thing a hacker can do would be to screw up your WP blog database, as long as you have the backups you can minimize the damage to your blog.

Change Detection: Chances are you already have an “about” or other static information page that changes very infrequently or never changes at all. Use a service like ChangeDetection.com to monitor it for changes and have it send you an email/SMS as soon as it happens. If someone injects a bunch of poker links in your footer this will let you know sooner rather than later. You can also use google alerts to alert you if something managed to slip by.

Block Brute Force Login Hacks: Sometimes automated programs will try to hack your username and password combinations. The Login Lockdown plugin can help prevent that. After a specified number of failed attempts the IP is banned for 30 minutes. Hackers will move on to something else. Every once in while you will lock yourself out if you change and forget your password, in that case you’ll need Emergency.php which lets you change your password and gain access. If you use this DELETE IT RIGHT AWAY or else someone could use it to gain access.

Limit Access With htaccess: If you’re comfortable working with htaccess, you can use it to grant access to the admin panel based on IP. If you don’t have a static IP, travel a lot, or have authors or editors without static IP’s this won’t work for you.

Social Engineering: Set up an account with admin priviledges but without the “admin” username, then delete the admin account. Use strong passwords, and don’t use the same password for all of you logins. If you’re old and suffer from short term memory loss try a password formula to help. Don’t give anyone who doesn’t need admin status admin status. Don’t give anyone who doesn’t need editor or author status editor or author status. Uncheck the “allow anyone to register” box unless you need to leave it checked. If you do need to let anyone register, put a captcha plugin on the page to keep the bots at bay.

Updates: Keep your blog and plugin as up to date as possible. Sometimes updating right away breaks plugin, so it’s a catch 22. But if you lag behind you have no one to blame but yourself when hackers do get in.

Using these suggestion in most cases you can maximize the SEO value of a blog by keeping on your main domain, and be reasonably sure the damage hackers can inflict is minimal, and your ability to spot it quickly recover from it is very very high.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress SEO: Wordpress Security Why it Matters to SEO

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While there are hundreds of thousands of posts on maximizing external links for your blog, like a red headed step child no one pays much attention to internal links. Internal links can be very powerful in helping you distribute the link equity that those external links bring, and they can decrease your bounce rate and increase your page views per visitor by sending your visitors to other pages. In this post we’ll take a look at some tools that help you link internally more effectively.

To be clear in this post we’re talking about links within the body or post area of your pages, and we’re talking about linking to pages within your website. Secondly before you put this strategy into action you’re going to have to make some decisions about site architecture. If you’re using your robots.txt file or “noindex” meta tags to block category, tag and date archives from the search engines from picking up duplicate content you may have to revist your thinking, as you don’t want to feed the spiders links to pages they can’t index.

To get an idea of what really good internal linking looks like take a look at this post on lifehacker, it’s filled with mostly internal links, since it’s a pretty helpful bit of linkbait information chances are it will secure a lot of  external links, and pass the equity on to the other pages. There are two ways you can do this effectively, automatically and manually, and we’ll look at both.

Chances are you’ve come across blogs where lots of words are always linked to internal pages such as the words [new mexico] on this post from Gadling. If you are running on the wordpress platform you can do this really easily with the cross linker plugin. Basically you set up words and tell it to automatically link to a preset page everytime it finds the word(s) in a post. This makes it really easy for a publisher as it’s a hands off operation once you set up the link. However from a user perspective, it can be problematic  at times. Let’s assume you have a travel blog and want to set up the word [Washington] to automatically link to a page you have about Washington state, no brainer right? Except if you write about Valley Forge where George Washington was camped, or you write about the Washington Monument, or about an article in the Washington Post. In each of those cases the word [Washinton] would have been automatically linked, but it would be awkward for the user as the link doesn’t match the context. You can override the autolinking, but it’s cumbersome, time consuming, and defeats the purpose. So if you use this solution use it sparingly and at a very high level.

A more manual aproach comes from the Insights Wordpress plugin. This plugin allows you to search your blog (or other external sources as well) from within the edit post page (see screen shot below)

Type in any term and it searches your blog for posts. If you highlight the words from the post, copy and paste and then hit the chain/pencil icon it takes care of the linking for you … automagically. While this approach takes more time, it avoids the awkward out of context links that I showed you in the first example. If you’re careful with which words you interlink, always use keywords, and avoid “this post” types of anchor text, you’ll help yourself focus your internal anchor text.

Lastly when you implement this tactic resist the temptation to link too many words, whether you do it automatically or manually. If you do it too much you end up looking a lot like a bad wikipedia entry, with too many links, that no one knows where to click to go next.

PS: yes I’m aware I used “this post” when linking to other people, but told you to avoid it, but of course internal and external links serve different purposes now don’t they …

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress SEO: How to Maximize Your Internal Link Strategy

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