Easy Article Linking
PHPKB knowledge base software offers a new and easier way to interlink knowledge articles while creating or modifying your knowledge base articles. Interlinking means creating links to other articles in the body of an article. PHPKB creates links to other articles are created using a specific syntax, called "Link Marker". This not only helps in keeping links organized but also makes the link management between articles easy.
In the article editor, this feature makes it very easy to insert links to other existing articles in the knowledge base.
How to interlink articles using a Link Marker?
There is a button on the WYSIWYG editor that opens the "Link Articles" dialog box (as shown below). You can browse the categories of your knowledge base and point to the required article using a link marker.
What is a link marker?
A link marker will ensure your internal article links are always up-to-date. Consider a case when you have added a static link to an article and later you decide to change the SEO URL type of your knowledge base articles from simple to professional or vice-versa. Now, think of how much time and effort you need to put in manually to modify all those static links in the articles by editing them one after the other in order for the internal links to match the new SEO URL type? Who has time to do such a boring and cumbersome task but if a link is added via link marker, you will not have to modify that article link manually. It is because a link marker generates the article link at runtime. Adding a link marker will only create a marker that points to the specified article, not the actual link. The link is created at run time (dynamically) according to the selected SEO URL settings. So, you can be sure that your internal article links will always keep working.
How link markers help to keep internal links organized in the knowledge base?
Let us consider an example of interlinked articles. Suppose, an article "A" is linked to in the content of articles "B" and "C" using link markers. Now when you try to delete article "A" from the knowledge base, the PHPKB software will alert you with a warning message that the article you are trying to delete is linked in the content of other articles along with the list of articles that contain is a link to article "A". This will save your knowledge base from having broken links in the content. Thus, you can decide whether to keep article "A" in the knowledgebase or delete it forcefully.
Benefits of Interlinking Knowledge Articles
Popular marketers like Neil Patel have written whole guides on interlinking. Interlinking is a good practice from SEO point of view and it is a concept you should definitely bring to your knowledge base articles. Here are some benefits of interlinking your knowledge articles.
- Linking articles together provides more context and a jump off point for your customers to learn more.
- Interlinking makes it easier for search engines to crawl your entire knowledge base.
- It adds relevant anchor text to pass some authority to the other pages in your knowledge base. That gives those pages a small boost in the search engine rankings.
- It also helps humans find other articles to help solve their problems. For example, look how we interlink articles in our help center:
Interlinking Best Practices
Here are some interlinking best practices for humans and search engine robots:
- Whenever you mention something contained in another article, link to that article with a link marker.
- Specifically try to include an internal link at the end of an article to encourage people to continue learning about your product.
