Internal Link Finder

Description

Search your entire WordPress site for internal linking opportunities that you may have missed.

Download the free version from WordPress

A solid internal link structure is crucial for Search engine optimisation, but if you’ve got a large website, it can be difficult to find anchor texts to hyperlink back to pages, posts or custom types.

Google (et al) makes sense of your content by using your internal linking. It looks for pages that have lots of internal links and the anchor texts of those links to help it understand what your site is about.

If you are not sure what ‘anchor text’ is, it’s the word or phrase that you hyperlink to another page on your site or an external site.

If your internal linking is a mess, it can have a negative effect on the ranking of your site.

How this plugin works.

The plugin works on the front-end of your website and allows you to find potential anchor texts that would create a good link back to the page of your site that you’re currently looking at.

Note that this plugin is not automatic – it does not create links for you as that’s potentially harmful to your SEO efforts (too many internal links are a bad thing).

1. When logged in to your website, browse to a page, post or custom post type that you want to find internal links for. This is the target page.
2. Using the Internal Link Finder search box, enter the potential anchor text you want to find on other pages.
3. The plugin then shows you a list of all the pages, posts or custom post types on your site that contain this potential anchor text that you can hyperlink back to the target page.
4. The plugin displays a link to either view or edit the page containing the potential anchor text so you can navigate to it and manually edit the anchor text to add the hyperlink to the target page.

Download the free version from WordPress

How to use this plugin to improve your on-page SEO.

As mentioned previously, this plugin is not automatic and it’s designed to show all the potential internal links to any page or post on your website. It should be used in conjunction with other SEO plugins on your site.

An example of how this SEO plugin can be used.

Let’s say a website has a target page for a or service such as ‘Icon designers’.

We want this page to rank for the search term ‘Icon Designers’, so this is the title of the page (or post) and we’ve already optimised the on-page content for the keyword.

Once the page is published, we can use the Internal Link Finder to search every other page and post on our site for potential internal links.

We could search for;

• ‘Icon designers’, which provide a list of all pages or posts containing this exact-match phrase
• ‘Icon design’, to show all the pages containing this similar phrase
• ‘Creative icons’, which is a broad-match term, but relevant to our main keyword ‘Icon designers’ – so the plugin would show all the posts or pages with this term in the content

The plugin shows you the content with the internal link opportunities so you can link them back to the target page.

More advanced use.

• We could use the plugin to search for the term ‘Icon’, but this is very broad
• However, if we find the broad term ‘icon’ it does give us the opportunity to edit the page or post copy to create a better internal link anchor, such as ‘professionally designed icon’, or ‘custom icon design’

This does require some content rewriting, but it’s well worth the effort involved to create better internal links.

Other uses:

• You can use the plugin to check if you have too many pages linking back to your target page with the same anchor text
• You can easily check all your content to see if you have important keywords or phrases the are missing from your content
• You can identify all your pages with no internal links for a particular phrase, rather than just showing you if the page is linked to or not

Download the free version from WordPress

This plugin is not automatic, and there’s a good reason why.

When you are doing on-page SEO on your site, you don’t want everything linking back to internal pages. This can look spammy and do more harm than good to your SEO.

The plugin is designed so that you can make decisions yourself and find the best internal link opportunities on your site – it does require some basic SEO knowledge, so it’s been designed to highlight potential links rather than to automatically link everything.

False positives.

This plugin searches everything in your site’s database; posts, pages, custom post types and custom fields (in the premium version), so you will get some false-positive results.
This isn’t a bug in the plugin as it’s designed to show you all the possibilities, even if you then discount some of them.

Download the free version from WordPress