31 Days to Building a Better Blog—Day 4
May 15th, 2008 by Nut
Time for Day 4 of my quest to build a better blog thanks to ProBlogger’s Guide. Yesterday was Day 3 and I did a Searched for and Joined a New Forum.
Today it’s all about Interlinking Archived Posts. What this means is that, when I write about something I’ve already covered before (say, alternative income), I link to that story as a reference. I’ve already been doing this since I started the blog, but ProBlogger is talking about getting old posts to point to newer ones. So let’s say I wrote about going to a baseball game a few months ago. The idea would be to go back and link forward to a newer post on the same topic. This way, when someone reaches an old page, he/she has the path laid out for them to reach new material that didn’t exist when it was written. This keeps things fresh and exposes more of your writing to readers.
He does mention the “Related Topics” plugin, and I have that going already. But I have never gone “back in time” to add links to newer material.This is a really good idea, but unfortunately for me I didn’t feel like I had that much material to go through. I ended up squeezing around 7–9 new links into my old stuff. It doesn’t feel like much but going through old posts was also helpful to remind me of what I’ve written and so I can link back as much as I can.
The whole process took about 40 minutes but, like all of these tips, is probably most effective when done on a regular basis—not on a one-shot deal.
On a side note, I’m glad people are enjoying the series, I figured it would be mostly helpful for me but if you guys are liking it that’s great! Also, FYI, I decided to do some posting on yesterday’s forum last night and this morning. I want to make sure I don’t just drop out of that one.
Click here to go back to Day 3, Search for and Join a New Forum. Or go back to Day 1, where I talk about the gist of the series.
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Post linking is a great way to drive readers deeper into the site, but I agree with you it is one of the more time consuming activities associated with setting up a post. I use a trick to make this a little easier.
When writing a post, have your site opened in another tab or window. Open the category from your sidebar that you plan to put the current post in and you should instantly have some archived posts on a similar topic to work in a few backlinks. Same idea applies when going back to update older posts.
One final trick, pay close attention to your web logs and make linking forward a priority on older posts that are doing well in search engines. This way, new readers from search engines are more likely to click-thru and find more current content. If you are like me, my content tends to get better the more I write, so hopefully this will impress a few visitors who will stick around as subscribers.