The problem is adding links is a tedious task. Sure, you have no problem doing it at the beginning, but after creating hundreds of links, you begin to wonder whether there are better ways to do it. If you are a WordPress user, today is your lucky day. We will discuss in this article some plugins that can help you automate the process.

Manual vs. Automatic

Is automating the whole linking process worth the trouble? The basic concept of automation is to save users time and effort of doing the same thing over and over, and automatic linking in this context means setting your WordPress machine to insert a specific URL to a particular keyword set automatically. But if you are creating your web content correctly, you would hardly ever re-link to the same external URL more than once. This scenario makes automatic linking almost not worth the trouble. Why would anyone create the linking rules if he/she would only use it once? It would be more efficient to do it manually. However, there are two scenarios where doing it automatically is a better idea. The first is internal linking where you are referring to something within your site or using a keyword to point to a post or page on your site. The second is to include affiliate links in multiple posts or pages.

Instead of hunting down a specific keyword across your site and turning them one by one into links (and repeating the process for other keywords), it would be better to use a plugin to do it automatically. The plugin will give you more time to focus on creating quality content.

Keywords to Links Converter lets the user set a particular keyword set and pair them with a specific URL. For example, you could set the keyword “Google” to always link to “http://google.com,” then upon activating the keyword, the plugin will automatically insert the URL to each and every reference of Google that it can find. You can tweak many elements of the link, such as adding several keywords that will be paired with the link, link type, where to open the link, URL shortener, slug, and much more. The plugin will search your site for the keywords and automatically add the link to them.

As the name suggests, this plugin is made for affiliate marketers. It will help the users to automatically add affiliate links to the content based on the pre-specified keywords. The content itself won’t be modified in any way. You can also cloak your links, set them to be “nofollow” or “dofollow,” limit the frequency of link appearances for every article, and a lot of other linking options.

3. SEO Post Content Links

SEO freaks know how important internal linking is to the website ranking on the search engine, and this plugin will help the users to automate the process. It will link different content with similarly specified keywords. SEO Post Content Link comes with a set of “black words” (the words that should be excluded from the automated linking process), but you could add more to the list. You can also limit the number of links generated on every post/page and specify the keywords manually, or let the plugin generate them automatically.

To create internal linking automatically, you could also try a similar plugin called Internal Links Generator.

More Linking Automation Plugins

Other than pairing keywords with links, there are other kinds of linking automation plugins for WordPress that will also help you with your internal and external linking purposes, such as the following.

This plugin will automatically add links to other posts on your site that use similar keywords. Other that being good for SEO, adding links to other posts on your site also increase users’ engagement and keeps them on your site longer. And you can double or triple the effect by adding thumbnails to the related posts links.

Table Of Content Plus (TOC+)

Another type of internal linking is connecting different parts of the content in the form of “table of content” similar to the one used by Wikipedia. TOC+ can automatically generate the table of contents for your posts and pages. You can also use a trick to make the TOCs stick to the widget area and not scroll out of the screen along with the content.

WordPress Popular Post

One way to keep visitors on your site longer is by showing them the popular posts. This plugin will make the process a breeze. You can put the popular post lists on several different widget areas and customize each one with different sorting options, time range, the number of posts to show, and even thumbnails from the posts.

This plugin is not a link automation, per se, but if you share a lot of links, you should consider using it. You can change any gibberish strings of URL that you want to share into something more elegant and memorable like “http://www.yoursitename.com/keywords.” And as a bonus, you can track the shared links to get a better picture of your sharing campaign.

Do you automate your linking efforts? What plugins do you use? And since it’s impossible to list all of the available automatic linking plugins out there, if your favorite is not on the list, please add them in the comments below.