You probably know by now that getting back links to your pages is the key to getting good rankings in the search engines but did you know that internal links also count as back links? Internal linking is something you should be doing as much as possible, it not only improves your rankings in the search engines but also improves the chances of all of your content being indexed.

The first thing you should do is add a few links in your footer to your main page using your main keywords as anchor text which you are trying to rank for. That will instantly give you a back link to your home page from every internal page with your keyword(s) as the anchor text.

The next thing I am going to show you is a really cool and really simple extension for Joomla which will automatically interlink your pages for you. You may or may not have noticed an extension in your components menu in your Joomla control panel called 'Simply Links'. I have neglected to mention it's purpose up until now because it didn't quite work the way I wanted it to however I had a little play around with it and have managed to get it to work the way I wanted it to.

The way Simply Links works is as the name suggests very simple, you enter a keyword which you would like to have linked to either an internal link to boost rankings or an external link (great for affiliate links) and it will automatically go through every single page on your site and find the first instance of that keyword and hyperlink it to the desired URL, that's it! Simple but powerful little tool.

Some of the changes I made to the original extension...

First of all by default it shows little icons next to the links it inserts to show if the link is external or internal which I didn't like so I removed them. Also for the internal link you have to insert the ID of the article which you want to link to which I thought was a pain so I changed that so you can just paste in the URL instead. One of the major problems it has is that if you had a keyword in a heading tag (which you should do for SEO purposes) it would insert the link in the heading which obviously isn't what you want, so I altered it to ignore content in heading tag and lastly I made external links nofollow so as not to leak PR out to external sites and they open in a new window.

Earlier versions of PIPS 2.0 didn't come with the Simply Links extension so you will need to download these two files and install them if you don't have it - Simply Links Plug-in & Simply Links Component

NOTE: Any PIPS 2.0 sites installed after the 17th July 2008 will already have my changes included.

If you want to include my changes and you already have the Simply Links extension installed then you only need to reinstall the Simply Links Plug-in. To do that just go into your Joomla control panel and in the extensions menu click on install/uninstall, then in the plug-ins section select the Simply Links plug-in and click the uninstall button.

See this article on how to install extensions http://www.onlineworkfromhomejobs.net/training/45-pips-20-how-tos/46-how-to-add-an-extension-in-joomla

How to Use the Simply Links Extension

• First of all log in to your Joomla control panel and in the components menu click 'Simly Links'
• Click new
• In the 'Name' field you want to enter the keyword which you want to convert to a link
• Leave published set to 'yes'
• For the category select 'internal' if you want the link to open in the same window and 'external' if you want it to open in a new window
• In the 'URL' field enter the URL you wish to link to
• The description field is optional you can leave it blank if you wish it is what is placed in the title field for the link. The title of a link is the text which is displayed when you hover over the link
• Lastly click save and you are done, just repeat the process for each keyword you wish to convert to a link