A Free Tool For Writers and Content Creators
How This Free Tool Removed My Big Pain
Link Map came to my rescue when I was struggling with my website’s internal link structure. This article explores how this innovative, free tool helped me visualize link relationships, identify missing links, and optimize my site’s SEO.
Read on to find out how Link Map can improve your website’s performance and user experience.
Today, I am writing an article on a different topic than software development. A problem I have been experiencing for a long time has been solved. I wanted to share it with you.
I tried many ways to solve this problem.
I created Excel spreadsheets. I updated each article with the link I gave to the article in its content.
I wrote new articles.
Over time, my spreadsheet lost its current status. Sometimes I spent hours fixing it. Sometimes I just left it there.
It worked when the number of articles was low. But as the number of articles increased, I started to lose track. Even if I updated my spreadsheet, I couldn’t visualize it in my head.
After a while, I stopped using my spreadsheet. However, this problem continued to occur every time I wrote a new article. I couldn’t keep track of which article I gave a link to.
Until I found this free site.
This site solved a problem that was important to me. I thought it would be useful for thousands of writers who produce content in different areas like Medium, so I wanted to share it.
Before going into detail, I immediately visualized the backlink relationships of my articles. The result really scared me. What do you think?
Of course, I immediately rolled up my sleeves and started updating my article links. My goal is to create a structure similar to the one below.
Let’s get to the details of the site.
Site is Link Map.
It is extremely easy to use.
It has a simple interface.
I have explained the use of the site step by step below.
Let’s continue…
Membership to the Link Map
You can become a member of the site with your email, name, and surname.
As I said, the site is free.
This is the best part.
After you specify your e-mail and password, you can log in directly to the site.
When you log in to the site, you will be greeted by a welcome screen like the one below.
What you need to do is enter the articles you want to visualize into the system.
To do this, you can click on the “My Articles” link in the menu on the left or the “Details” link in the articles section.
On the page that opens, all the articles you have entered will be listed.
New members will see a blank page, of course.
To add a new article, click on the “Add Article” button in the upper right corner.
A modal screen like the one below will open. On this screen, you must enter the title and link of the article.
After entering your articles into the system, you now create create the links.
This is also extremely simple.
The number of backlinks contained in each article is shown in the “Link count” column as marked below.
When you click on the “Link Count” link of the article, a screen like the one below opens.
Click on the “Add Link” button at the top right.
Then select the article you want to link to and click the save button.
Congrats! You have added a link to your article.
After entering all the articles and the links they contain, you can now move on to the visualization phase.
Create a Graph to Visualize Article Link Structure
To do this, you have to access the graph creation page using the links I marked in the image below.
On the screen that opens, click on the “Create Graph” button at the top right to create a new graph.
A modal screen like the one below opens.
Give a name to your newly created graph image.
It is also possible to choose to whether our articles should be displayed with their titles or ID numbers.
Then, click on the “Create” button.
You can see the graphs on the list.
Open your graph by clicking on the name of the graph record.
If the image is too large, you can see that it extends beyond the screen when it is first opened as shown below.
I hope, this problem will probably be fixed soon.
When you hover over the image with the mouse and do Ctrl+zoomout, you can resize the image as we want.
The first graph I created is shown below.
I quickly realized that I needed to analyze these connections in depth and make the necessary updates.
Now let’s create a graph using the article ID values.
To do this, click on the “My Graphs” link from the left menu and go to the graph listing page.
Click on the “Create Graph” button and after entering the graph name on the screen that opens, select the “With ID” option as shown in the picture below.
The new graph created is shown below.
It is also possible to see the full title of the article when you mouse over the article box.
For more complex graphs, the ID option seems more logical to me.
To print the created graph object, you can take a screenshot or print it directly as a PDF by pressing Ctrl+P.
A Facility for Medium Articles
There is a feature added for Medium articles.
It is possible to automatically pull links from Medium articles.
Let me explain how this works.
On articles list screen, click on the “Link Count” link of an article. If this article is a Medium article, the “Crawl Links” button appears in the upper right corner.
Below, you can see a Medium article of mine.
This article contains links to a total of 3 Medium articles.
In our scenario, there are 4 links on my link-map page.
Over time, I have updated my article but not here.
Now, instead of manually updating them one by one, Link-map will do the hard work for us.
To do this, click on the “Crawl Links” button. A list like the one below is created.
The red cross here shows links that are not in the article but have already been entered into the Link-map system.
We can delete these links by clicking the cross sign.
The OK sign shows that the link in the article is also registered in the Link-map system.
We don’t need to do anything for this.
The plus sign shows links that are in the article but not in the link-map system.
We save the link to the linkmap by clicking the plus sign.
Thus, our linkmap and Medium article links are synchronized.
Then it’s time to organize our links…
Click here to go to the Link-Map.
👏 If you found the content useful, you can follow me and make me happy in this way.
💬 If there is something I overlooked, you can share it in the comments or contact me on my profile.
💬 Let me know in the comment section what have I missed? Where I was wrong?
👨👦👦 You can also share this article with your friend. Argue a little on it. It is known that the truth is born in a dispute.
🙃 Stay determined, stay focused, and keep going.
Thanks for reading.