Links are a key part of SEO for your website. They paint a picture of exactly how important the different pages and articles are to the main topic of your site.
A common mistake is publishing something new and not link to it at all. This leaves only the core archive page linked to the new article. Which in Google’s eye, the archive page means nothing. You just told Google this new article you spent tons of time on means nothing. Noooooooo!
And believe me, I have made this mistake too.
Of course, we don’t want to just link any article to any other. Ideally you should be building silos of content. Links for your brand new piece about fishing should all come from other articles related to fishing (or whatever you talked about in the article).
Think of each silo like a pyramid. Each article builds and the next and so on. But there is a funny thing with this pyramid that most people don’t understand. It’s upside down!
Instead of creating links from this brand new article which Google knows nothing about yet, you need to create links from your past articles to this new piece. What you are saying is “Google, you already know about this cool article about fishing poles. Now I wrote another article that relates to poles, all about hooks. Go check it out.”
Back to our pyramid. The smallest block is on the bottom – this is your key topic (fishing). Stacked on top of that is four blocks giving more details on each part of fishing (ocean, fresh water, fly, etc.). Then on top of those you get deeper (fly fishing poles, fly fishing tricks, making lures).
So now with this fancy new article, we decide on key bits that could be linked to the articles below it, then we return to those articles and link to the new one. This passes some of the power from the past to the new article giving it near instant credibility. Sure, you can still drop a few in the new article going down, especially if there is a needed reference that you should refer to. This “link juice” as they say in SEO can pass both ways.
Lastly, don’t forget to go out to other sites and share your fancy new article. Those sites will also pass link juice to your new article and help it get reach.
Links are key when telling search engines what’s important. And creating links the right way will get you there faster. With only a couple minutes to do this for each article, what’s stopping you?