Cross Linking to Improve Google Rankings

It might sound strange, but while reading other blogs to keep in touch with the latest developments in the world of blogging, search engine optimisation and making money online is important, so to is reading your own blog. This is because one of the best ways to increase readership of your blog is through cross linking. This involves linking to other posts on your blog from within your article and is a very effective way of directing your readers to additional useful content.

When you are writing an article, you should link users to relevant parts of your website to allow them to gather more information on something mentioned in your blog post. For example, cross linking is part of the wider problem of how to structure an article and, as we have an existing post on the subject, it makes sense for us to provide a link to this topic to provide you with additional information.

Reviewing Old Blog Posts

However, as you add more articles to your site, you may write about a topic which provides additional information on a previously covered topic. Therefore, by regularly reading your old blog posts, you can find opportunities to link to new articles.

As by now, your old articles should hopefully be indexed by the search engines, ranking well and bringing in decent amounts of traffic, this provides an ideal way to redirect your readers to your newer topics, helping to teach them the subject at hand and sell the services you have on offer.

How to Edit an Old Article

When you are editing an old blog post, be careful not to edit too much. Re-writing or rewording the article could lead to a drop in your Google rankings, so it is best to leave the content intact. It should be fine to add a “update” paragraph at the bottom of the article, but if you feel you need to make a major change to the article, it would be best to write a new post and link to the new article from the original blog post.

Instead, you should focus on cross-linking from your old article. This involves searching for keywords in your original article which are relevant to your new posts and creating a link to the article, as we have done in paragraph two.

SEO Benefits of Cross Linking

As we have learned, text links are a major driver in your search engine position and to improve your Google rankings you should seek to increase the number of keyword text links.

While links from external links are the key driver in improving your rankings, a clever internal linking strategy can also help move your site up the search engines. Cross linking is one of the most effective ways to do this.

The way to do it is to create keyword links to other articles on your site from within your existing articles. By linking in context you will notice benefits. By in context, I mean by using a keyword link which is relevant to the article you are linking to. For example, if your article is about keyword domains and this is the main keyphrase in the article, you should link to it using “keyword domains” as your link anchor text.