Interlinking Content

The next step to building our site is to interlink content of our pages to other pages on the site.

I recommend to try to get your informational pages to link up to your product pages to try to funnel traffic through your site to your money pages.

This step accomplishes a few purposes:

1. SEO - By linking particular words and/or phrases in your site content to other pages of your site, you can boost the relevance of keywords on your pages. Just like all keyword related SEO, be sure to use this in moderation so you do not get flagged for keyword spam.
    
2. Navigation - Visitors on your site can easily tell when you have content relating to a particular word and can simply click on it to view that page. Major websites like Wikipedia use this same tactic. For these Amazon affiliate sites, this can also help us funnel our traffic to specific pages on the site.

You can actually accomplish this step in one of two ways or even use a combination of both: manual or automatic.

Manual interlinking is pretty straightforward. Just browse through your site and pick out specific places or words that you want to link to other pages on the site. This is definitely more time consuming. However, if you have very specific places that you want your content to link up to other pages of your site, this may be necessary to do manually.

This same tactic can also be done automatically, although with much less control. Depending on your plans for interlinking site content and the number of pages on your site, this auto solution may be a better choice. Extremely large sites would be very time consuming to set up interlinking manually, for example. Addition of new pages on a site can also require revisions on many other pages, while the automatic solution avoids this problem.

The SEO Ultimate plugin that we installed on the site actually offers a module called Deeplink Juggernaut that allows us to automatically interlink content.

I'm going to walk you through the setup of this particular feature, and show you how it works.

To get started, look for the SEO menu in the WordPress admin sidebar.

Hover over SEO, and then click on Deeplink Juggernaut.

On the Deeplink Juggernaut admin page, click on the Content Link Settings tab.

On this tab page, look for Quantity Restrictions on the left, which can be seen towards the bottom of the picture above.

Click on the three checkboxes here to select them. This prevents the plugin from creating too many links on each page and too many links to the same page from each page.

I also want to change the numbers here. For my site, I'm just going to set the first number at 3 and the second number at 1 (they were 5 and 2 at their default settings).

These number adjustments simply limit the amount of interlinking that can take place on my site, which will help to reduce chances of keyword spam.

The next step is to visit the WordPress page editor. We'll start out by just clicking on the Pages admin menu link.

Looking through your site pages, identify the pages that you actually want visitors to end up on because they are your money pages that are promoting Amazon products.

For my site, this is going to be the brand pages: Pinzon, Pyrenees, PrimaLoft, Ikea and Pacific Coast.

I now want to edit each of these pages.

Below the WordPress editor, you'll find the SEO Settings box that is created by the SEO Ultimate plugin.

I want to click on the Links tab.

In this tab, I want to add text that should get automatically linked to this particular page from other pages on my site.

For this example, I have edited my PrimaLoft page. When I was writing, I had a number of pages where I made a specific reference to PrimaLoft, so I know there is content on my site containing this word in relevant places that I would want linked to this page.

PrimaLoft is also the base of the keyword phrase I'm targeting on this product page, so this makes this particular word a good word to pick for my autolinks. I'll just add the word PrimaLoft to the large text box in this tab, as seen in the picture below.

I also want to be sure to click on the checkbox for the Autolink Exclusion to ensure that these links aren't created on this same page.

Although I'm only using one autolink word for this example, you could choose to enter multiple words/phrases here - just add each one on a blank line in the large text box.

You can choose to try to target your full keyword phrases with these autolinks, but this can easily become keyword spam. You may also not have used the full, exact phrase throughout the site in many places. I prefer to use shorter phrases and maybe even single words when possible for my autolink text.

Try picking the most relevant word to target to the page if you are just using a single word. For this example, I could have easily used “Pinzon PrimaLoft” or even just “Pinzon”, but “PrimaLoft” is really the most relevant single word to target for this page (and I know I have referenced this word in my content a few times).

Once you have made changes to that tab and set up the autolink(s) for that page, be sure to click on the blue Update button on that page to save the changes. When this is done, the links are automatically created on the other pages throughout the site where your word/phrase is found. This is also done according to the settings we initially set in the SEO Ultimate plugin.

If I visit a page on my live site, you can see the word PrimaLoft in the third paragraph has turned into a link because of this autolink I have created.

Notice how the second occurrence of PrimaLoft in the last sentence doesn't get converted into a link. This is because of the settings I created previously.

If I wanted both instances to be linked, I would have to manually link the last one or set the last two numbers on the settings page to 2 instead of 1.

If I only wanted the last occurrence of the word PrimaLoft to get linked, I would have to remove the autolink for this page and manually create the link on this page and other pages myself.