In the middle of July I wrote a post titled Should You Link To Yourself In Your Posts?, in which I took a look at a recent trend in blogging where blogs are adding a lot of internal linking into their posts instead of linking out to other websites. 

Up until writing that post, I had always felt use of the Related Posts and In Series plugins on a blog was sufficient internal linking and filling your posts with additional internal links was a bit of overkill.   I was also concerned that often linking internally takes away from your linking externally, which is a core function of building relationships with other bloggers and getting exposure for your website. 

In the month and a half that has elapsed since writing that post, my views have changed a little bit.  Most notably, I have done some additional studying of the most commonly accepted Search Engine Optimization tactics, as well as readying more about website’s link juice and the value of inbound vs. outbound links.   It looks like in addition to improving the reader experience, there are several SEO benefits to linking to other posts you have done.  As a result, I have been trying to find a little more balance by doing a little more internal linking in my posts, but still providing useful external links whenever possible. 

Yesterday ProBlogger talked a bit about this subject, but took it a little further with Darren’s post about using anchor text when linking internally, and the SEO benefits of practicing this.  The rick is to make good use of keywords in your links to your other posts to get the full SEO benefit.   Darren also recommends that you apply this practice to your monthly archives and categories, in addition to linking to your individual posts. 

Do you make an effort to use proper anchor text when linking internally?