Internal Linking Optimization of WordPress Blog Posts Without Plugins

The term of Internal Linking Optimization means the placement of internal links from one pages of blog or website to another for transferring some more weight to most important pages of your blog. In fact, before making some external WordPress SEO optimization steps, you need to make good internal optimization and internal linking structure is one of the first steps you need to do.

I suppose that if you’re using WordPress, then your website is a blog and the main content of all blogs are blog-posts. This means that you need to give more weight to your posts. If you will have more links, internal and incoming links – you will get more traffic from search engines, especially from Google (read my previous article about How to add WordPress blog to Google). Usually all bloggers and webmasters are using widgets and plugins for internal linking (such as “Popular posts“, “Relative Posts” etc), but this is not enough, because some of the posts may not get in to this lists of links. In this case you need something like “Previous posts” WordPress hack.

Internal Linking Optimization of WordPress Blog Posts Without Plugins

“Ring Chain” internal linking structure

This WordPress hack will help you to create optimized ring “chain” internal linking structure of all your blog posts where absolutely all posts will be interlinked with each other without any plugins.

This is a scheme by which all your posts will be linked:

As you see on the scheme, all your WordPress posts will linked one by one and the last post will have link to the first post. For example, if you have 10 posts – first post will have 5 links to Post № 2,3,4,5,6 … second post will have links to Post № 3,4,5,6,7 … post № 6 will have links to Post № 7,8,9,10 and 1 – you will have ring of links, where all posts will have same number of incoming internal links. This method is really good for internal SEO optimization of your blog.

How to do this WordPress hack without a plugin

To show list of previous posts of your WordPress blog, you need to past the following code to your functions.php file (just in case, make a copy of functions.php):

<?php
/**
 * Show list with previous posts.
 *
 * by Webdesignzo.com
 */
function webdesignzo_previous_posts ($post_num=5, $format = '', $list_tag='li', $echo=true){
	global $post, $wpdb;
	$sql ="SELECT ID, post_title, post_date, comment_count, guid
	FROM $wpdb->posts p
	WHERE ID < $post->ID
		AND post_type = 'post'
		AND post_status = 'publish'
	ORDER BY ID DESC
	LIMIT $post_num";
	$res = $wpdb->get_results($sql);
		$exclude = $post->ID;
		foreach ($res as $id) $exclude .= ','.$id->ID;
		$count_res = count($res);

	if ( !$res || $count_res<$post_num ){
		$post_num = $post_num-$count_res;
		$sql2 ="SELECT ID, post_title, post_date, comment_count, guid
		FROM $wpdb->posts p
		WHERE ID NOT IN ($exclude)
			AND post_type = 'post'
			AND post_status = 'publish'
		ORDER BY ID DESC
		LIMIT $post_num";
		$res2 = $wpdb->get_results($sql2);
		$res = array_merge($res,$res2);
	}
	if (!$res) return false;
	preg_match ('!\{date:(.*?)\}!',$format,$date_m);
	foreach ($res as $pst){
		$x == 'li1' ? $x = 'li2' : $x = 'li1';
		$Title = $pst->post_title;
		$a1 = "<a href='". get_permalink($pst->ID) ."' title='{$Title}'>";
		$a2 = "</a>";

		if ($format){
			$date = apply_filters('the_time', mysql2date($date_m[1],$pst->post_date));
			$Sformat = str_replace ($date_m[0], $date, $format);
			$Sformat = str_replace('{title}', $Title, $Sformat);
			$Sformat = str_replace('{a}', $a1, $Sformat);
			$Sformat = str_replace('{/a}', $a2, $Sformat);
			$Sformat = str_replace('{comments}', $pst->comment_count, $Sformat);
		}
		else $Sformat = $a1.$Title.$a2;
		$out .= "\n<$list_tag class='$x'>{$Sformat}</$list_tag>";
	}
	if ($echo) echo $out;
	else return $out;
}
?>

/**
 * Show list with previous posts.
 *
 * by Webdesignzo.com
 */
function webdesignzo_previous_posts ($post_num=5, $format = '', $list_tag='li', $echo=true){
	global $post, $wpdb;
	$sql ="SELECT ID, post_title, post_date, comment_count, guid
	FROM $wpdb->posts p
	WHERE ID < $post->ID
		AND post_type = 'post'
		AND post_status = 'publish'
	ORDER BY ID DESC
	LIMIT $post_num";
	$res = $wpdb->get_results($sql);
		$exclude = $post->ID;
		foreach ($res as $id) $exclude .= ','.$id->ID;
		$count_res = count($res);

	if ( !$res || $count_res<$post_num ){
		$post_num = $post_num-$count_res;
		$sql2 ="SELECT ID, post_title, post_date, comment_count, guid
		FROM $wpdb->posts p
		WHERE ID NOT IN ($exclude)
			AND post_type = 'post'
			AND post_status = 'publish'
		ORDER BY ID DESC
		LIMIT $post_num";
		$res2 = $wpdb->get_results($sql2);
		$res = array_merge($res,$res2);
	}
	if (!$res) return false;
	preg_match ('!\{date:(.*?)\}!',$format,$date_m);
	foreach ($res as $pst){
		$x == 'li1' ? $x = 'li2' : $x = 'li1';
		$Title = $pst->post_title;
		$a1 = "<a href='". get_permalink($pst->ID) ."' title='{$Title}'>";
		$a2 = "</a>";

		if ($format){
			$date = apply_filters('the_time', mysql2date($date_m[1],$pst->post_date));
			$Sformat = str_replace ($date_m[0], $date, $format);
			$Sformat = str_replace('{title}', $Title, $Sformat);
			$Sformat = str_replace('{a}', $a1, $Sformat);
			$Sformat = str_replace('{/a}', $a2, $Sformat);
			$Sformat = str_replace('{comments}', $pst->comment_count, $Sformat);
		}
		else $Sformat = $a1.$Title.$a2;
		$out .= "\n<$list_tag class='$x'>{$Sformat}</$list_tag>";
	}
	if ($echo) echo $out;
	else return $out;
}

Save your functions.php file.

Now, to show list of previous posts, you just need to put next code into single.php (it can be different template file, it depends on your WordPress theme):

<ul>
<h3>Previous posts:</h3>
<?php webdesignzo_previous_posts (5); ?>
</ul>

You can change the number of posts in the list by changing "5" to another digit and you can change "Previous posts" to your text. Also, you can change the look of the output by adding some CSS styles.

Optionally, you can add some additional information about posts (date and number of comments).

Example of code:

<ul>
<h3>Previous posts:</h3>
<?php webdesignzo_previous_posts (5, '{a}{title}{/a} (Comments: {comments}) | {date:j.M.Y}'); ?>
</ul>

You can see the example of working "Previous posts" WordPress hack at the end of each post on my blog (under "About author" section).

Later I will write a post about how to do the same Hack, but with filter for categories. This hack will show previous posts from current category.

This is only one of the existing methods of internal SEO optimization which you can use in combination with other tricks and WordPress plugins. Post your comments if you want to share some more tricks or if you have any questions about installation of this hack.