Interlinking is one of the major factors for on-page SEO. You must be using an SEO plugin like SEO by Yoast, SEOPressor or simply SEO by Thesis. All these plugins and features strongly advice you to interlink your posts within your posts, and millions follow their advice. All the bloggers practice interlinking, and undoubtedly some do it relevantly, while some do the opposite.

The practice of interlinking can be improved in a few ways, which may further help both in reducing the bounce rate of the blog as well as improving Google pagerank.

Following are some tips to effectively interlink your blog posts. A last couple of tips may seem to be informal, but they’re yet effective.

Interlinking Above The Fold

As a blogger, you’re definitely aware about “Above The Fold”. If not, it simply means – The visible part of the page when visitors land on it. Depending on your theme, you might show a good part of the page when a visitor lands on it, or you might just show a small part that shows the headline and an ad on the sidebar.

Assuming that the first paragraph of the article is above the fold, I advice the following -

• Never leave the first paragraph empty i.e. without a link.
• Don’t panic about the readers, as it is not annoying to see a link or two in the first paragraph.

The Pertinence Of Interlinks

Search Engines hate irrelevancy when it comes to interlinking, and so do readers. Interlinking a post about “buying clothes” with an anchor word “make money online” is just like mixing alcohol and milk together – completely useless, tasteless, and a waste.

Do not panic to use your affiliate links, as you deserve the same. But make sure you don’t over-use the facility provided by WordPress, as you might just upset the search engines!

The Size Of Interlinks

It is advised to use a phrase rather than a single word, as phrases not only help in better search engine rankings but even help the reader to get a better idea of what he’s advised to read through the link.

For example, linking “make money with a blog” will prove to be more effective than linking “make money” for a post titled “How To Make Money With A Blog”.

Informal Yet Effective Interlinking

As mentioned above, following are a couple of informal interlinking tips. Make sure you strongly follow these, as they do play a strong role in getting more clicks hence increasing more page views and decreasing the bounce rate on your blog/site.

The Style Of Hyperlinks

Mostly, bloggers use the same styling with comes with their default themes. For example, if one uses a green color for links on the blog,
the post would most probably have the links in green.

The styling depends on the blog owner – if he/she wants to be different, then the links within the posts can be changed by coding. This is very easily possible with thesis.

Styling is just for the sake to attract readers, hence it doesn’t have an effect on the search engine rankings.

Leave The Headers Alone, For Heaven’s Sake

I’ve personally seen many blog posts where the headers (like above) are used for interlinking! That is so annoying because headers are meant to let the readers know what is the content about.

Instead of interlinking the headers, it is advised to interlink the keyword in the first sentence in the content below the header. This will not only make it look beautiful, but even attract more clicks.