Links are a vital part of a growing blog. They provide not only additional information and resources to delight your readers with but help anchor you in the blog ecosystem.

In this post we will take a look at:

• What are links?
• How to add links to you WordPress post
• Working with internal links
• Linking to other blogs
• Embedding links
• The blogging ecosystem
• Links as SEO
• Building links with WordPress

What are links?

Links are those clickable things that take you to a new web page. Like this. They can also take you to a bookmarked part of a page you are already on. That’s what the menu of topics in this post do.

Without links the World Wide Web would simply not work.

How to add links to your WordPress post

You can add links to your post by highlighting the text you want to turn into a link and clicking the link icon (the funny looking thing to the right of the italics button).

What will happen next is the link box will open. It will probably look something like this:

If you start typing in that box, WordPress will start looking through all of your posts and pages to try and find the page or post you are looking for. It might look something like this:

When you see your post that you wanted to link to, click on it. You text is now a link. If you want to change the link while you are editing you post, click it to open the link box back up.

Working with internal links

You can use links -called internal links – to allow readers to jump to a specified point on your page or post. This is good for longer content like this post.

First you will need to set a HTML anchor on the place you want to link to. For most blocks, there will be an advanced settings section in the sidebar. By default this is closed. Give it a click to open it up.

Inside (at least for headings and paragraphs) the first option is HTML anchor. Put some text in there. It needs to be unique for that page or post. If you add more than one HTML anchor, use different words for each one.

You may notice spaces get replaced by dashes. This is perfectly normal.

Copy the HTML anchor text (Ctrl+C on most computers). No highlight the text you want to make into an internal link. As before open the link box.

This time, however, you are going to type a hash (Americans call it the pound). Then past in the HTML anchor text. So you get something like this – #Working-with-internal-links.

You should see that WordPress has figured out you want to use an internal link.

Linking to other blogs

Linking to other blogs works in much the same way. Except you will need to get the permalink for the post you want to link to.

Some people make the mistake of linking to the front page of a blog. This is not terribly helpful as sooner or later the post you want to show your readers will vanish into the archives. Instead, you need to find the link to that post and only that post. This is called the permalink (on blogs) and URL or URI (everywhere else). It does not matter much what you call them.

To find this link visit the post or page you want to link to. For example our recent post, “A beginner’s WordPress primer“. In the navigation bar (usually found at the top of your web browser) you will see the address to the page. Something like this.

That text in there is the permalink for our primer post. Copy it (highlight and Ctrl+C or right-click and choose copy).

Now go back to your post. Open the link box again by selecting the text you want to link. Instead of typing anything, paste the permalink into the box.

Press enter as directed and you have now linked to another person’s blog post (or whatever it was that you think your readers might link to visit.

Embedding links

We talked before about embedding links in our “A beginner’s WordPress primer” post. WordPress can embed videos, music, tweets, and a lot of other things including WordPress posts.

To embed a link simply past the URL to the item into a completely empty (new) block. This is what happens:

If it can, WordPress will make your URL or permalink into an embedded link. This works with lots of types of links.

The blogging ecosystem

Blogs do not exist in a vacuum. Your new blog can and should be part of a wider ecosystem of blogs. To join the blogging ecosystem, you can start by linking out to posts that your readers will find useful. The better the links you provide the more your readers will trust you to share things that they are interested in (and the more likely they are to come back again).

Likewise, if you write good posts, eventually other blogs will link to your best posts too. This will send new readers your way.

Links are not the only part of the blogging ecosystem. Leaving insightful comments that add value to someone’s post is a good way to grow a possitive reputation with other bloggers. A good reputation can earn you many more links than good content alone can.

We will take a deeper look at the blogging ecosystem in another post.

Links as SEO

SEO is a huge topic. We cover SEO in our Author Platforms guide found here. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation but what it means to you is showing Google that your content is worth showing in search results.

A key ranking factor is the links your site gets. Google is not silly, if you make lots of links to a poor quality page, they will quickly cotton on and your efforts will be for naught.

Instead of trying to game the system (which always fails in the end), work on providing the best content you can. This will give other blogs a good reason to link to you.

Building links with WordPress

There are lots of techniques that can be used to build up inbound links. Many of them are spammy and bad for your blog in the long term. We will look at one that is fairly unique to WordPress – pingbacks. We talked a little about pings in our “A beginner’s WordPress primer” post.

When you link out to another WordPress blog, your WordPress sends a ping. This alerts the blog owner to the fact that your post links to them. If they like your post, they can allow the ping to appear as a comment. Your ping links back to your post.

Which means that if you write good posts and link to other good posts, you will slowly build up relevant inbound links. This will help you find your place within the blogging ecosystem. Who knows, maybe other bloggers will start linking to you too.

Over to you

I hope this guide to links has helped you understand WordPress, the blogging ecosystem, and especially linking just a little bit better. If it has a comment telling me that would be hugely appreciated.

Have I missed anything out? What would you add? Tell me in the comments.

Is there an aspect of WordPress blogging that you would like me to cover next? Again, tell me in the comments.

How do you use links? Do you link to other blogs very often? Do you link to your own posts? Have you used internal links before? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Until next time, happy blogging.