One of the most effective things you can do to help optimize your site for search engines is to link to yourself.
It’s ok. Everybody does it. There’s no reason for us to feel uncomfortable talking about it.
If you’re like me, part of the motivation for self-linking may be that you think a post you wrote a while back was super clever and funny and you hate that anyone would have to miss out on reading it. That’s the narcissistic side of self-linking, and for me that never pans out. It turns out I’m not as funny and clever as I think.
But internal links count with search engines. They are an easy way to build internal Page Rank because they pass Page Rank from the pages doing the linking to the pages linked to. They are also a great way to establish keyword relevance to a page since you have total control over the anchor text used to create the link. And let’s not forget they are a great way to direct traffic to your “anchor” articles that newcomers to your site may not have seen way back when they were written.
Now, wouldn’t it be nice if all of these links could be created automatically? If you’re using WordPress, there’s a very easy way–the SEO Smart Links Plugin. This plugin is super easy to configure, and it even has nifty options for linking out to other people automatically such as “open in new window” and “don’t pass Page Rank”.
Even if you have to build your page to page links manually, it’s worth the effort for all of the reasons described here. Don’t forget that newcomers to your site may need a little help digging further into what you have to say, and internal links are a great way to give them a hand.
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