Using WILO is quick and intuitive.
First, you’ll need to download it from the WordPress repository and install it on your website.
As with all WordPress plugins, we advise that when installing WILO for the first time, you use a development or staging environment to test the plugin install before deploying it to your live website.
Once WILO is installed, you use it on the front end of your website – there is no admin interface for this plugin.
The Page Audit tab.
Step one.
Visit a page on your site that you want to optimise.
Click the WILO tab on the left-hand side of the screen.
The UI will open, and WILO will analyse the page for the first time.
Note that the larger your site, the longer WILO will take to complete the analysis.
Once complete, you will see all the internal links to your current page (note that WILO does not include links from <nav> or other elements that it recognises as Navigation elements – it’s only looking at the content inside your article.
Step Two.
WILO will identify any duplicate anchors and stuffed links:
- A duplicate anchor is where separate pages link back to the current page using the same anchor text.
- A stuffed link is when the same page links back more than once to the page you are inspecting.
If you want to change duplicate anchors or remove stuffed links, you can simply click the edit page button to be taken to the page to edit the content and modify the link or remove the stuffed link.
When you update the page or post, you can return to WILO on your page and refresh the results to see the improvements.
The Link Explorer tab.
To use this, you need to enter keywords or phrases you want to find on your site and link back to your current page.
Choosing anchor texts.
As with all things SEO, there are different ways to do this – you can go with your gut instinct and search for terms you know will be useful, or you can do some keyword research and look into what anchor texts you could use based on this (we will cover this option in another tutorial).
Enter your keywords (single words are best) or phrases (there is less chance of a match) into the link explorer, and WILO will search your site. It will return a list of page titles, slugs, and matches for your search, together with the potential impact of the backlink.
Note that this ‘potential impact’ is a simple calculation—it’s based on the number of internal links already on the target page. If there are none, then adding an internal link will pass 100% of the link; if there are 2, it will be 50%, and so on.
WILO is link-aware, not content-aware, so you must decide on the relevance of the potential page to backlink from.
If your landing page content is about ‘topic A’ and your potential link page is about ‘topic Z’, you need to consider how relevant the link will be. However, if both pages are about ‘topic A’, then it’s a potentially relevant backlink.
Clicking on the keyword match will open the potential linking page in a new tab and highlight the keywords.
You can quickly assess the link’s potential relevance and decide whether this is a good internal link opportunity.
If the link works, you can then edit the post and link back to your target page.
A note on internal linking.
Don’t link from all pages – you need to ensure that you are making contextual decisions about your internal links. Otherwise, you might as well use an automated tool.
- Does the page where you are going to add the internal link be relevant to your target page?
- Can you rewrite the paragraph in which the potential link appears to make it more contextual and relevant?
This is one of the key aspects of WILO that makes it different from automated tools; WILO expects you to edit the content to make the link more powerful, not just add a link and be done with it.
Rinse and repeat.
Now, do this for every landing page on your site.
It’s that simple: work through them all one by one and get your internal linking scores to 100/100 for each one – you will then see a boost in the search results.
Take your time and do this properly.
There’s no point in doing this if you rush it—it needs to be done carefully and with consideration for everything else you are doing on your site.
You are curating your internal links to each landing page of your site to help the search engine bots better understand your content and the context of the links.
Should you do this on blog posts?
If a page does not convert, rankings and traffic are important as the page is important and relevant in the SERPs: capitalise on this ranking to pass the link juice to your converting pages.
There are two ways to view your blog posts:
- Articles on your site are designed to inform the search engines of your topical authority in your niche and provide an internal link base for your converting landing pages.
- Landing pages in their own right.
Number one is correct. You don’t need to use WILO to cross-link between your blogs; you want to use WILO to link to your important landing pages vertically, but that’s an entirely separate post in its own right.
