Wordpress is embraced as both a blogging platform and a full-blown CMS, running both small sites and enterprise properties elegantly. It does so many things so well that it has emerged as the sound CMS choice for bloggers and business owners that care about search rankings.
Out of the box, WordPress delivers better-than-average search engine readiness, but layer on a few power tips, and it becomes downright supernatural. I want to share some of the approaches to link architecture that I employ in my work as a digital marketer and all-around SEO guy that I've found have improved both rankings and user engagement on websites. These advanced link architecture techniques bring both higher rankings and improved user engagement. While advanced in theory, these tips are very simple to implement.
The weakness of navigation links
All websites need navigation so users can, well, navigate. That's why WordPress offers several tiers of navigational options that can clutter a site and undermine rankings. Including date-based archives, seen here.
Date-based archives have two very serious inherent weaknesses: first, they aren't that useful for users. How many users actually think, "I want to see what was posted here back in May of 2012"? Aren't you as a webmaster better off offering links to related content, rather than links to random content based on an arbitrary time period?
Secondly (and here's where search rankings get impacted), date-based archives are "navigation without context." This means that these particular links do not send signals to search engines. Consider also that any WordPress archive (date, tag, category, or author archive) serves up duplicate content - a search engine ranking negative. WordPress generates archives by grabbing each post title and a few sentences from the body of each post; the system then stacks this duplicated content on a blog page. I almost never recommend employing date-based archives except on sites where dates are the context, such as a news site.
WordPress Author archives are also potentially devoid of context, but may have value to users on a multi-author blog. Category and tag archives, unlike date-based archives, do offer context and category signals because they are, after all, grouped according to keywords and phrases.
But category links are still navigation links generated by WordPress archive functionality, and potentially lead to pages of duplicate content, as outlined above. Combine category archive links with tag archive links, and the duplicate content problem is compounded.
Finally, you must also consider how PageRank and authority pass throughout a site. Sure, PageRank has been diluted from its pure state, but this principle remains unchanged: that internal links send signals to search engines "this page I am linking to is important." You can highlight important content with greater precision through in-content links than you can with site-wide navigation.
The role of site-wide navigation on mobile devices
We also need to consider the fastest-growing segment of website traffic: mobile users. Excessive navigational choice is simply not the best way to engage users on palm-sized devices. First of all, where do you put your tag navigation or date-based navigation on a mobile device? Would you put it above the body content? Of course not.
A better approach: contextual linking between related pages
Now let's examine a better approach: in-content contextual linking. Sophisticated link builders and SEOs have always understood the power of an in-content link over a navigational link. It is well understood that Google can discern, in most cases, the difference between links in the body of a website and links in the footer of a website. Google's Matt Cutts has said, "our link analysis continues to get more and more sophisticated... if something's in a footer it might not carry the same editorial weight... whereas something that's in an actual paragraph of text is a little more likely to be an editorial link." You can see Matt's full explanation on the Google Webmasters YouTube Channel.
There is another reason why in-content internal linking is a good idea. "SEO Engineer" Mike King of iPullRank stated at the 2012 Pubcon, "when a site or blog doesn't link to itself, that's a spam signal." Mike continued to note that it simply isn't natural for a site to have dozens of pages of text between 400 and 600 words and then not link to itself. In-content internal linking is natural, user-friendly, and search-friendly.
Implementing more enlightened WordPress navigation
So let's implement this idea. Imagine an article or blog post on the topic of social media tips for restaurant owners - but this idea works with any topic. Your article obviously has a topic and keywords on the page, and Google is skilled at the categorization of both your site and individual pages on your site. In the body of your document, you link to a prior article you did for social media tips for taxi drivers. The two articles share common keywords and a common category, so you are strengthening the keyword signals for both pages. And, because the pages are related, it's quite easy to link between them without sounding awkward.
In our example, the in-content links that share a common context will be useful to a reader because after all, the reader is already enjoying particular article on a certain topic. This is not unlike the principle behind Related Posts-type plugins. The purpose of these plugins was to keep a user on your site by providing a simple path to continued engagement on your site.
And of course, you can also drop a link to one or more of your services pages. So, for example, if you offer social media management you can easily drop on in-content link to your services page with fairly aggressive anchor text. Remember that you can always be more aggressive with anchor text within your site than you can with inbound links.
Link to your "money pages"
Your website has "money pages" - they are the pages that engage customers and make them act. If you are tracking conversions as you should, your analytics will give you a clear picture of what pages are delivering customers to you. Those high-converting pages are the pages you want to be linking to with contextual links to drive both rankings and user clicks.
If you have goal tracking set up in Google analytics, you can navigate to Behavior > Landing Pages to see the high-converting pages that are truly delivering customers.
Conclusion
To distill all this down, if you want to rank better and improve your customer engagement, implement contextual links and minimize your traditional WordPress navigation. Remember: you need not ditch your WordPress archive navigation entirely, just keep it to what is necessary.
Start the new year right, with a smarter Wordpress navigation.
