As you grow your WordPress website, you’ll spend time driving traffic to your site. This is part of your SEO (search engine optimization), and you’ll do a lot of in on social media.
Because you’re sending traffic to your WordPress site, these links are known as inbound links.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to link to your site. (We talked about creating links from your site here.)
Here’s an example.
Let’s say I want to tweet and post on Facebook and Google Plus about a recent How-To video I added.
As I’m writing this, the video shows up as the second item on my Blog page. It’s called Pages Menu: Sixth in our In-Depth Look at the WordPress Dashboard.
Do you see it on the page now? Is it still the second item?
Nope. . . because if you’re reading this, there’s a newer article at the top of the Blog page — this one. So it shoves the video to the third position.
So how do you send an email, or post on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter or other social media and direct people to the right post?
Find the URL of the Exact Item you Want to Link To
This may sound silly, but think about it for a minute.
Say you’ve just written the best blog post ever on your particular subject. You want to share it with the world. So you post, tweet, share, stumble, pin and spring a link to mysite.com/blog.
That’s terrific. Someone who clicks that link right away will see your most recent blog at the top of the page, just like you want them to.
But what happens if they happen across that tweet or post next week?
Oops.
Sure, they’ll come to your blog, but they’ll see a different post. They’ll end up confused — and trust me, you don’t want to confuse your readers.
Here’s how to do it the right way.
#1. Get the full URL
- If the article or post you want to link to is on your blog page or homepage, click its link to navigate to that specific, individual page. Now, instead of seeing it as an item on a blog page, it’s all by itself.
- Position your cursor in the browser address window and highlight what’s there
- Copy (CTRL-C in Windows) the address
Here’s what the address window looks like in the three major browsers:
#2. Create the Link
Different social media sites have different ways for you to create links.
Whatever their method, when they ask for the link, make sure you give them the link to the page or post all by itself — not a page where it shows up with other articles.
Paste the link that you’ve previously copied (on a Windows machine, you can put your cursor where you want the link and then hit CTRL-V to paste).
Now you’re sending people to the right link. Whether they click this minute, next week or next month, they’ll arrive at the item you wanted them to see.
Linking to a page other than your homepage also helps with SEO, another good reason to create deep links into your WordPress site.
When you link directly to the content in this way, you also make it easier for others to share your links — especially on social media like Pinterest where an image link can have a very long life span.
