One of the most important SEO strategy is to build a smart and effective internal links structure, with an optimized number of internal links for each post, that are at the same time relevant for the search engines and natural for the readers.
The Interlinks Manager plugin provides you a series of tools that helps you develop this structure, so you can increase your website visits, sell more products or convert more users.
Analyze the interlinks
Inside the
Dashboard menu, with regular expressions applied to your posts, and by tracking the users clicks, this plugin is able to retrieve information such as the number of manual internal links, the number of auto internal links, the number of visits generated with your internal links, the optimization status and more.
With these information at your disposal will be easy for you to add or remove internal links when needed, and always keep an optimized number of internal links in every post.
Calculate the link juice
The
Juice menu gives you information about the flow of link juice on the URLs of your website, and provides, for each URL, a detailed list of all the single links that contribute to generate the overall link juice.
Get interlinks suggestions
The
Interlinks Suggestions meta box is a tool that helps you find articles related with the post being edited. By taking advantage of this algorithm you can save the time normally spent manually looking for new appropriate internal links.
The algorithm considers several factors, and is able to give priority to specific posts when their titles include a word that are also present in the post being edited, or to give priority, include or exclude posts that belongs to specific categories, tags or custom post types.
The exact behavior of the algorithm used to retrieve suggestions can be modified through the plugin options, so you can enhance its precision and make it perfect for your specific situation.
Create auto interlinks
With the
AIL ( auto internal links ) menu you are able convert specific keywords or phrases to internal links. This feature can be especially useful in the following situations.
A WIKI KNOWLEDGE BASE FOR YOUR BLOG
Let’s say that you have a blog that talks about search engines optimization and you want to convert each term that is part of your glossary of SEO terms in a link to the post with the definition of the term. To achieve this simply start by adding a new keyword or phrase ( that in this case corresponds to a SEO term of your glossary ) and the URL path that should be used as a destination, repeat the process for all your SEO terms and you are ready to go.
AUTOMATIC LINKS TO THE PAGES WHERE YOU ARE SELLING PRODUCTS
In a situation where you have a large amount of posts at your disposal and you need more visitors on the pages where you are selling products ( or converting users ), you could, for example, decide to convert to a link each keyword or phrase related to the pages where your selling products. A good selection of keywords and phrases would be for example composed by “our products”, “premium area”, “my book”, “get the book”, “our custom t-shirt”, “our supplements”, “the newsletter”, etc.
AUTOMATIC INTERNAL LINKS TO YOUR BEST ARTICLES
If you are for example a server administrator, and you want to increase the importance of your best articles, you can use automatic links to convert phrases like “configure a server”, “CentOS guide”, “learn server administration”, “Windows Server”, etc. and point the keyword to the actual articles.
Autolinks with no concerns
Common concerns with links automatically generated are that you don’t want to:
- Accidentally create too many auto internal links
- Generate problems with your website SEO
- Annoy your visitors
So I have included options that allow you to have under control the application of your auto internal links:
- Custom keywords or phrases boundaries to avoid accidental applications of your autolinks
- Selection of post types where the autolinks should be applied
- Maximum number of conversion of a single keyword in a single post
- Maximum number of conversions of all the keywords in a single post
- Case sensitive or insensitive match ( selectable for each keyword )
- Open the link in a new browser tab ( selectable for each keyword )
- Application of the rel=”nofollow” ( selectable for each keyword )
- Priority of the substitution of the keywords ( this ensure that the most important keywords are always converted when the defined maximum number of conversions of the keywords would prevent this to happen, this option is also useful to determine which keywords/phrases should be converted first if for example a post includes a phrase that should be converted, but that phrase also includes keywords that should be converted )
- A customizable list of protected tags, useful to avoid accidental substitutions of keywords inside specific tags
- A test mode that allows you to create autolinks and get statistics without actually apply them when the blog is read by normal visitors and search engines, so you can actually activate the autolinks to the public only when you are satisfied with the private result
Track the clicks
If, after applying your internal links strategy, you are wondering if your changes are really helping the website performance, you can track every click made by your visitors on your internal links and have specific answers. The following information are provided:
- The post that received the click ( available for each single click )
- The date on which the link has been clicked ( available for each single click )
- The target of the clicked link ( available for each single click )
- The type of the link, manual internal link or auto internal link ( available for each single click )
- The number of visits generated with the internal links included in a specific post ( this stat is available as as a table column in the Dashboard menu )
Note that if you don’t want to track the internal links you are free to disable this feature with the plugin options.
Interlinks optimization
Interlinks Manager also includes a meta box able to tell you if the number of internal links of the post is optimized. This suggestion is not based based on fixed criteria you may disagree with, instead, your custom defined values and the length of the considered post will be used.
The purpose is that, if you are going to apply an internal links strategy, having a suggested number of internal links helps you identify which posts needs to be edited and which posts already have a proper number of internal links.
Export the generated data to your favorite spreadsheet software
The data about your internal links, the link juice and the tracked links can be exported through the
Export CSV section available in the plugin menus. The generated CSV files can then be imported in your favorite spreadsheet software to perform your custom analyses, modify, share or print the data.
Enable specific plugin parts to certain user roles
In the
Options menu you can select the capabilities required to get access on specific plugin features, so you can for example enable the
Interlinks Suggestion meta box for your contributors and editors and leave the other features disabled for them, give to a special user role the ability to perform analysis on your posts and so on.
Feel free to use this plugin on large amount of data
Before releasing this plugin I created bots and downloaded entire websites, tested the plugin on large amount of data and optimized the regular expressions and each single database query to make it able to work on every possible situation.
Just to give you an idea, with this plugin you can get information about the internal links or the link juice of 100.000 posts in about 120 seconds ( please note that factors other than the number of posts might increase or decrease the actual time required to perform an analysis, more info are available in the plugin documentation ), this means that when normally used for example with your latest 1.000 you can generate the results almost instantly.
You can even use the plugin with websites that have millions of posts, although I limited the maximum number of posts that can be analyzed in a single iteration to 100.000 to avoid long waiting time and a possible complete consumption of the PHP memory.
No external services are involved
This plugin make use of regular expressions to analyze your posts and doesn’t use any external service, this means that once you get this plugin you can perform your analyses an unlimited number of time. There is only you, regular expressions, and your server CPU that does the work.
Gutenberg Ready
WordPress is changing and the TinyMCE editor will soon be replaced with the new
Gutenberg Editor, a page builder that uses blocks to create all types of content.
This plugin allows you to select exactly on which Gutenberg blocks the autolinks should be applied. So you can be very precise in the application of the autolinks and avoid any kind of issue associated with the application of autolinks on Gutenberg blocks.
Multisite Ready
This plugin can also be used on a
WordPress Network, and supports both a Network Activation ( the plugin will be activated on all the sites of your WordPress Network in a single step ) and a Single Site Activation ( your plugin will be manually activated on single sites of the network ).
Multilanguage Ready
Interlinks Manager comes by default in English and Italian, if you want to translate the plugin in another language simply create a translation file or manually translate it with a multilanguage plugin.
