Connections between your content

Since auditing content for customers, I recognize that people might be confused about how to connect their writing. They end up with either no connection between posts (creating orphaned posts) or very little technical benefit from the connections. How to fix it?

Posts vs pages

Considering time. When you write content that is not changing frequently, please consider using pages. For example, an About-me page, or a service page. On the other hand, the content on posts is usually affected by time. Let’s say you are selling a program and you just release a new version of the software. Then a post about this update would be nice. Or a post about an event.

What is a post-category?

This is a view from your readers. You have multiple pieces of content on your website. Without categories, your readers might be lost, they don’t know where to start. Of course, there is a search function but splitting your content into different categories will help to navigate much easier.

What is a post-tag?

You can use tags as internal reminders of what the posts are about. Your readers will not know about the tags before they read your posts. So tags are something you are using yourself for connecting your posts. Considering SEO on-page techniques, besides categories, using tags is another way to help Google bots to understand your site’s structure, follow your content and index them.

Post-tags vs internal links

They both can be used for connecting posts. But please note that they are still different things.

Tags are more general ideas, can connect posts on similar topics. Links (for both internal and external) are more on specific terms (anchor text). It tells readers about what they expect to see when clicking on the link.

For example, you are writing on a Zen rock garden in a paragraph. Then you can highlight the phrase «Zen rock garden» and connect a link to the post about the Zen rock garden.

On SEO techniques, internal links pass authority to the destination. By doing that way, Google will rank the destination pages higher. That’s why many try to implement a strategy:

  • building blog posts (with a lot of text, images to get traffic)
  • then link to product pages (important pages) which are usually having much less content, more technical terms.

Anchor text… well, Google algorithms use them to check if your post is relevant, not just another spam-keywords-post. So, while it’s important, please think carefully when you choose anchor text.

When implementing these connections?

You can start with categories on a new site. Since you keep writing, have more content, then review your content and start creating tags. Having tags from the beginning might be harmful more because it might create duplicate content between tags and categories.

When you have more posts, there is nothing to prevent you to edit your old posts either. As mentioned above, posts are related to time. Your writing two years ago might not correct anymore. Then you can update the posts with new information, new tags and more internal (and/or external) links. Giving old posts fresh air will bring more traffic to your site.

Hopefully you are not getting confused by now 🙂 There are still other issues, this post is just basic information for you to start. If you have questions and want to discuss, feel free to click here for sending me a message.

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