If there is one thing that can help you get better search rankings without publishing more content, it is internal link optimization.
Adding an internal link to a blog post is relatively simple in WordPress:
- You have to press the insert link button.
- Search for the blog post you want to link, and
- Click on add
But how do you make sure the page you’re linking to is relevant and will help the reader?
What should be the anchor text?
Most beginners will have a dilemma in choosing specific anchor text to add an internal link. Many won’t even know which page to link.
And to help you with all of that, there’s an excellent tool called Link Whisper.
Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin that helps you to add links to relevant pages on your blog.
It shows you the best anchor text for the link by analyzing all of your published blog posts. Basically, every time you write a blog post, you’ll have many link suggestions below your editor.
It scans your blog and suggests a link that has a contextual correlation. With just one click, you can add these links with the recommended anchor text in your blog post.
The Link Whisper reports will help you understand and fix any orphan pages on your blog. This helps in reducing the bounce rate as well as increase the indexability of your blog.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can optimize your WordPress blog’s internal link structure with ease.
Step 1: Get Link Whisper
Link Whisper is a premium WordPress plugin. There is no free version, and unfortunately, there is no trial version as well.
The basic license is priced at $67 for 1 site and goes way up to $147 for 10 sites. You can use the coupon code “Link10″ to get a $10 discount on all plans.
To begin, you’ll have to purchase a license of Link Whisper. Once you do that, you’ll receive the license key along with the plugin ZIP file on your email. You can also download it from your Link Whisper account dashboard.
Upload the ZIP file to install the plugin on your WordPress blog. Click on activate, and you’ll be redirected to the settings page.
Step 2: Configure the settings.
The plugin is fully automatic, so there isn’t any initial setting configuration involved.
You can choose if the links added by Link Whisper open in a new tab or not. There is an option to ignore numbers for links in your blog post.
You can also choose which post types will appear in the Link Whisper suggestions.
Link Whisper automatically ignores articles, nouns, and pronounces. If you want any specific word to be ignored by Link Whisper, you can add it too.
A few settings for more advanced users allow you to enable debuffing mode, improve memory usage, and report data for instant change. If you are on shared hosting, click on improve memory usage and save the settings.
Most of the time, you won’t have to worry about any of these, so it is better to skip this.
Step 3: Access Reports
The first thing link whisper does is analyzing your blog posts. It has to be done once, and after that, it happens periodically and automatically.
How to add links using the Link Whisper Suggestion box
Link Whisper suggests you internal link ideas right inside your WordPress editor. The good thing is it is compatible with Gutenberg as well as the TinyMCE editor.
To see the suggested links, scroll down to the bottom of your editor.
You’ll see a box like this:
Now you should remember two things here:
- Link Whisper is continuously developed.
- You’ll have to actively select links before adding them.
Most of the time, you will have to choose the links carefully before adding them. Mind you, it just suggests the links based on word-to-word matching. So, it won’t be wise if you blindly go on adding the links recommend in the suggestion box.
However, it makes the link recommendation pretty well. It helps you understand which blog posts you should be linking to, along with the sentence where it will suit them best.
You should start seeing results after adding at least 30-40 internal links to the blog post you’re trying to rank.
It is much similar to Yoast internal linking suggestions, but Link Whisper, along with blog post suggestions, also suggests the appropriate anchor text for the link. Something which Yoast currently misses.
You also get the on-click link update feature. You can simply select the suggested link and click on the update button. This will add the link to the post and updates it with the suggested anchor text.
You can add or remove the words from the suggested anchor text by clicking the text inside the suggestion box. This will allow you to remove any unnecessary words, such as stop words from the link.
If you are a complete beginner or even a professional blogger, you’ll appreciate the Link Whisper plugin in the long run. It will help you understand what relevant pages on your blog are and how you can interconnect them for a better user experience.
Overall, I’ve been using Link Whisper for a few weeks now, and I’m pretty much impressed. It is a cool plugin for improving the site structure and on-page SEO.
Let me know what you think.
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