WordPress is a great platform to build a website with, but it’s not exactly optimized for search engines right out of the box. There are certainly things you can do to improve your chances of getting ranked high on the search engines. Let’s face it. Writing good quality posts and using your keywords in your posts are only a small part of the process. You are going to have to work on other on-page and off-page tactics to make your WordPress website as search-engine friendly as possible.
Your internal link structure is one of the factors that could play a role on how well your pages are ranked by Google and how often your site gets crawled. Linking to your pages with the right keywords can help Google and other engines get a better understanding of what your site is about and how they should go about ranking all your pages. That’s where Smart SEO Links comes into play. It’s a powerful SEO plugin for WordPress that automatically generate links to your internal pages (in your posts, comments, and …) and helps you maximize your traffic and get your visitors to stay on your website longer.
SEO Smart Links is pretty easy to use. All you have to do is install it on your blog and let it know how you want it to treat your posts, pages, and comments. You can use the plugin to automatically generate links to your other posts and pages on your blog. It is also possible to have it link to “self” from each post on your blog. What I like about the plugin is its flexibility and options. For instance, we all know that links in headers could be ugly or look out of place. This plugin gives you the option to avoid that possibility.
The plugin goes through your words and finds words that it can use to link to your internal pages. You can also define words that you want to be used as links in your posts. Of course, you have the option to define an ignore list for this plugin.
SEO Smart Links is truly smart. It keeps you in control and lets you define how you want your links to behave. You can no follow your links and make them open in a new window by automatically adding target property to your links. It’s also possible to define a limit for the plugin to keep it from going wild on your posts.
If you are looking for an easy way to improve the internal link structure of your blog and optimize your site for the search engines, SEO Smart Links is a great free plugin you should install on your blog.