Using internal links in articles is very important for SEO and for increasing engagement for your posts. You need to take advantage of any trick to increase your Google rankings and one of them is building internal links.

In case you have a big blog with a lot of articles it can be hard to build links to new articles as you don’t know where a certain keyword was used in the past article. In this article, I will show you an easy way to search all the posts in the database for a certain keyword.

For instance, if you have written an article with the Best WooCommerce Wishlist Plugin you can easily search for the wishlist keyword in the DB and identify all the articles that are using it. Then you can go to each article and link it manually. This process can be done easily in the database with a simple query and you will not need to use any plugin.

Video

WordPress Plugins That Can Help With Building Internal Links

If you don’t want to use the manual way to build internal links then you can utilize some plugins that can do automatic internal links or suggest where to put the internal links. But before thinking of using a plugin take into consideration the bellow:

• Slow Down The Site – using a plugin to automaticaly do interlinking can slow down your site, you need to think if is worth it.
• Security Issues – having another plugin to do something in WordPress is not ideal, every day new vulnerabilites are discovered in plugins and your internal link plugin can be one of them
• Cost Money – Plugins are not expensive but if you are in beginning you may not have the budget for any plugin, that’s why the manual way is ideal.

Now in case, you want a plugin let’s see some of the plugins that can help you also with the internal links, some of them are free but it is offering limited functionality.

Link Whisper

This is the best one out there from my point of view and if you want to use a plugin for this you should go with this. It is the lightest one and it’s offering the most features. You can check more on the official website.

Internal Link Juicer

Another good plugin that can help you build links automatically. It is highly customizable and can help you build links automatically. It has also a free version that you can check, for all the futures check their official website

Rank Math

This is a complete SEO plugin that has also a feature that can help you with suggesting internal links for pillar content posts. You can check this article with all the details.

Yoast SEO

Another SEO plugin with a tool that can help you build internal links. You can check their article for more details.

How to Add Internal Links in WordPress Without A Plugin

The manual way to find articles that uses a certain keyword needs database access. Basically, you will search for all the posts that have a certain keyword and you will go and manually add the link in the article.

This flow is not hard and is not taking a lot of time, also you will have full control over the keyword and how many times to link it. This is not fully automated and requires some time to do, but new articles will have links from old ones and will get some Google love.

1. Login to DB with phpMyAdmin

First, you need to go to cPanel or in the hosting provider panel and open phpMyAdmin:

After you are in your phpMyAdmin choose the DB that your WordPress website is using ( you can check the wp-config.php file in case you don’t know which one is) and go to the SQL tab like in the bellow picture:

2. Build the SQL Query to Search thru the Posts

Next, you need to query the tmp70a2a1_posts table and find the posts that are using the keyword you want and link to access it. The below query will give you the post_title,post_name,guid that can be used to identify the post. Just replace the keyword with your search word or sentence, it needs to be in lower letters ( all the details will be in the video)

SELECT post_title,post_name,guid,post_type FROM `tmp70a2a1_posts` where lower(post_content) like '%keyword%' and post_status ='publish'

And then hit Go. Once again replace only the letters from ‘%keyword%’

The list with all the posts and post_type will be shown and you will need to take the guid URL and use it in the browser to see the article:

3. Insert Link in The Article

With the guid URL you navigate to the article and edit it. Another option is to search in the posts the post_title. After you are in the edit mode just search the existing article with ctr+f or command +f and type the keyword in the box. With WordPress add a link just search for the article you want to use:

After just save the article and you move to the next one.

This is the easy way to search what articles are using a keyword and build a link to them. This is a manual task but is important to interlink your articles properly so you increase your SEO rankings.

If you are using something different just drop a comment and let everyone know.