Properly spreading the link juice in your blog posts is a great way to improve the Search Engine Optimization of your blog, as it tells the search engines which posts on your site are the most important.  As a result, I’ve set a goal for myself and have been working hard to improve on the internal linking done within my posts and sending the link juice to the posts that I want to rank the highest with the search engines. 

Due to this recent change in philosophy on my part, I paid close attention yesterday when I ran across this post by Steven of Daily Blog Tips titled 10 Easy Ways to Improve Internal Linking On Your Blog.  Here are four that I would like to comment on:

2. Create a FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions pages can help you to get internal links to your posts while using highly targeted keywords and phrases. Create some common questions readers might have that can be answered by your blog posts. Pose the question on the FAQ page and partially answer the question and provide a link to a particular post for more information. When phrasing the questions, use keywords that readers are likely to use when performing a search, as this can help to improve traffic from search engines. Also use keywords in the anchor text of the links to your posts.

This one immediately jumped out at me.  What a great idea! I don’t think a FAQ deserves its own exclusive page, though, so I will look into adding something like this to the bottom of my About page. 

5. Write a series of posts
One easy way of building up the number of internal links going from one post to another is to write a series. As the series is written and published each post can link to the others. If you have a very long post, consider breaking it into a series. Be careful not to do this all the time as your readers may start to feel like you are using them to gain page views.

This is actually something I already do with one of my favorite plugin, In Series.  I only mention it because I don’t see many other blogs taking advantage of this plugin.  Your page views will go through the roof if you use this on posts that receive a lot of search engine traffic.

7. Place links on your 404 pages
Error pages are frustrating to visitors. Help make your 404 error pages more-user friendly and drive a little bit of extra traffic to some of most important posts. Most WordPress themes include a 404.php file that can be edited to include and content you want, including links. If you are using a WordPress theme that does not include a 404 file, see the WordPress Codex for instructions.

This is another thing I did when I switched over from TypePad to WordPress.  My 404 page currently displays a custom message explaining the situation, then I’ve provided my Popular Posts in the body of the page and a search engine thrown in so subscribers can try to find the posts they are looking for.

10. The aLinks plugin for WordPress
WordPress users can take advantage of the aLinks plugin to automatically create links for commonly used phrases throughout their blog posts. The plugin is designed for use with internal links as well as external links (especially affiliate links).

This is something I am going to look into.  Has anyone used this plugin before?  I think it looks extremely useful, but could potentially become annoying if it added to many internal links. 

Those are the four that jumped out at me, but there are a total of 10 great tips included in the post. Are you building up your site’s link juice with proper internal linking?