Once you get used to writing blog posts, you will gradually think about how to grow your blog more.
There are several actions you want to take to grow your blog website and this time I would like to focus on something called internal linking and external linking.
The Key to growing your blog
Internal linking and external linking are the essential preparation you have to do for better SEO-optimized site construction.
Internal and external linking are in the category of SEO strategy.
In the below paragraph, I will also include the reasons why internal and external linking are so important in terms of user experience and site growth.
Let’s dive into it.
What is internal linking?
Internal linking is inserting the link of another article of yours inside the blog post when you create your new blog post.
If you read my blog post carefully, you will notice that every single blog post that I create includes internally linked posts.
It looks like the one below.
If you want to know more about SEO strategy, please refer to the blog post “” What is a long-tail SEO strategy and why it's so important?.
↑ This is how you internally link your other posts.
The 3 reasons to do internal linking in every blog post are...
- Session improvement
- Pageview per user improvement
- Duration of visit improvement
Session improvement
According to the Google support blog post "How a web session is defined in Universal Analytics", the definition of a session is as below.
A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. For example, a single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and eCommerce transactions.
( Quoted from How a web session is defined in Universal Analytics )
What it means is that if you start reading this post and if you also read two of my other posts within 15 or 30 minutes and leave my website, that is counted as “ 1 user, 3 sessions”.
The reason why internal linking will improve the number of sessions is that if you insert the right related blog post links, it will be very user-friendly so that the users are more likely to go to other blog posts to know more about the same topic.
One thing you have to be careful about with internal linking is that you should never randomly put links.
The basic and most important rule of blogging is to be user-friendly all the time.
You get paid by the ad company or affiliate marketing company only because your blog post is 100% user-friendly.
If you are a beginner, I know you want to do a lot of internal linking but that is not the way your blog truly grows.
If you think there’s no need to do an internal linking to certain blog posts, then, please don’t.
Page view per user improvement
The second reason why internal linking improves your blog is that the right internal linking will improve the index called page view per user.
Page view per user is kind of similar to the idea of session but what's different from the session is that page view per user doesn’t have to be in a certain time frame.
For example, if you read one blog post of mine every single day for one month but only one article per day from the same phone, that will be “ 1 user, 30 page views per this user”.
* definition of user is counted based on the IP address so I mentioned "the same phone"
The internal linking has to be something that leads the visitors to the right references, so when you are to do the internal linking, you always have to think about whether it is the right paragraph to insert links or not.
Duration of visit improvement
The third point you want to remember about internal linking is that internal linking will improve the duration of visit.
The duration of visit is counted from when a user opens any post of your domain till a page of your domain is closed.
For example, if you start reading my blog post from this post and you go to another blog post and it took 30 minutes, then the duration of the visit is 30 minutes.
The right reference of internal linking will extend each duration of visit because if a user wants to know more about the related content, it is more likely that the related article will be read in order so that the duration of the visit will be longer accordingly.
What is external linking?
External linking is to link a post outside of your domain.
For example, if you want to mention medical data, you want to be sure that you quote the right data from the right resource.
When you qupte some sentences from a medical journal, you will also need to mention the original link that you have quoted from or otherwise, you will be a content thief.
This is when you do the external link, and a medical journal post is externally linked by you.
The reason to do the external linking is to strengthen your blog content’s accuracy and liability, but please be careful not to quote unreliable information.
Dr.Aeropress is my other blog but here I will treat it as someone else's and how you do the external linking is as below.
According to the post from Dr. Aeropress, it seems that Porlex is the easiest hand grinder that beginners can start from.
( Quoted from "All about Porlex coffee grinder setting and review")
↑ The point is you have to clarify which URL the information came from
Summary
Internal linking is very useful for SEO strategy because the below three improvements will work positively for your domain which leads your website to be ranked in a higher position in the research result.
- Session improvement
- Pageview per user improvement
- Duration of visit improvement
If you want to do the internal linking, you should focus on certain topics in one blog site and create posts with internally linked together.
I hope this article has helped you to understand more about the basic idea of blogging.
Last but not least, if you want to start blogging for your future profession, please refer to the below blog post.
↑ Internal linking ;)
Thank you for reading.