So, we know how to link to pages outside our site to add a bit of a holistic approach to our topic. We also know how to link our internal pages together so that the web crawlers as well as our visitors can be made aware of all the great content we have.

Great work!

We've written our new blog and each time our text mentions something do with another page or post on our site, we have created a link to that page. We of course use this sparingly if we happen to mention the other page topic often, we don't want to look like we are spamming.

Wait a minute

This works great if we had all our pages created at once, but what about our new content? From the new content we can link to what is already there, but when we created our old content, the one we are creating now didn't exist. There must be lots of text in our older pages and posts which could be linking to our new page.

Oh dear, what a task. Do you really have to go and reread the old pages to find that text? NNNNNNOOOOOOOoooooooooo........................

Don't Panic!

WordPress makes this quite easy.

Let's look at an example of a website about airliners. I have written about various airliners and of course there are so many out there that the subject material will go on for quite some time to come. As I write about each, I will probably mention others in one way or another as relates to competition or superseding.

So I am writing about the Boeing 727 and I have posted this. I already have 69 other pages about various airliners and I am pretty sure that I have mentioned the 727 in at least one of two of these, maybe more. Who can remember, right?

My first action is to go to the dashboard in WordPress and select; Pages > All Pages

In the top right hand corner is a search box.

You can see that I have typed 727 in this search box as I am wanting only to see pages which have the character group 727 in them. This means I don't have to open every one of my pages to see if I have mentioned the 727 in any of them. I am using WordPress to do the leg work.

WordPress has reduced the pages I have to actually eyeball from 70 down to 9.

Ok, I can nearly manage that. But, I know some of those pages I have written were up to 2,500 words. That still is a lot of reading to do to search for mentions of the 727.

Not so fast, WordPress is still here to help, or at least your web-browser is.

On each of the pages, click Edit.

Once it is open, use the text search function to search for incidences of the word you are looking for. If you are not familiar with this function, then it is:

Any Windows browser - CTRL-F

Safari - Command + F

With your page in edit mode we can do a search for our word that we want to link form in our text.

The 727 appears once on this page and it highlights it for me. If it appears many times, then be a bit selective about which ones you turn into a link. I don't think search engines want to see a whole heap of links to the same page.

Once I have settled on the word I want to link from, I simply highlight it myself and then select the link button from the menu.

We then locate the page we are linking to in our "Or link to existing content" option box and we are done.

I would then go through and do that for all of my 9 pages which I narrowed down from my 70.

Once done with the Pages, I would then go and do the same with Posts.

Remember, every link from an existing page that is doing well to a new page will only help it get discovered more quickly, by search engines and by your customers.

Let them know you are there.