The main way you can increase the traffic flow and SEO on your website is through the copious usage of links. They are the highways of the internet and through them, you can access almost anything online.
Gone are the days when you directly input website addresses onto the browser search bar. These days you generally just google something and follow the link it provides you. This logically leads to, on the developers’ side, having a much larger focus on maintaining those links.
Ensuring that all the links on your website lead to a safe and secure page can help you boost your traffic immensely. After all, no visitor wants to go to a site that might risk their data.
Controlling all of your links can get quite hectic, but if you built your website with WordPress then there’s a nifty solution for optimizing link control. With WP Links you can control external and internal links on your websites, ensure the SEO of your website, and fully protect your visitors.
Having a plugin that condenses all of the link control onto one page massively helps you optimize workflow.
But before you go instantly installing this awesome plugin make sure to check out its features down below.
1. How to Control Links
One of the most important aspects of link control is External and Internal Links. They include all the links that connect your pages inside your website, as well as all outgoing links.
WP Links condolences all the rules for Internal and External Links onto two simple pages. There you’ll be able to dictate how your links are opened if they open in new tabs, does the browser follow the new link, and so on.
By setting up these rules you’re controlling how every external link operates on your website. The same applies to internal links.
A word of advice, make sure that external and internal links don’t have the same rulesets as oftentimes visitors prefer different types of navigation for external and internal links.
Generally speaking, external links are preferred as new tabs, and internal links are kept on the same tab. Another handy feature WP Links offers is ‘set follow or no follow’.
With this feature, you can control whether or not your visitors will follow the accessed links. This can be incredibly important if your links follow onto external sites immediately, or if you want your visitors focused on your site.
With WP Links you can also set up the look of your link icon so that it matches your website’s theme.
2. Exceptions
And just as everything in our reality has exceptions, so does WP Links. These exceptions can manifest from all the external, internal, and excluded links you have on your website.
For example, your rulesets could ignore entire link types that have specific classes in them. Instead of opening a new tab for the new website you created, you can exclude it and treat it as if it was a continuation of the starting website.
This can tremendously simplify the process of migrating your viewership to a new website as it streamlines them onto the new site.
Or if you have a really strict external linking policy, but you just received a sponsored article you can use exceptions to isolate the rules on that article page. That makes the rest of your website as secure as usual, all the while your articles link onto external pages seamlessly.
And if you have certain CSS classes you can fully skip the prewritten rules so that they don’t clash with the work you put in for those classes.
It’s important to note that you can add entire URLs to the WP Links lists so that it automatically recognizes which links can be included and which are excluded from your link control rules.
3. Exit Confirmation