Layered Thoughts

Problem

There are two really important reasons why you want to add a list of links to related posts on your Wordpress blog for each post you right. The first is that this is a really useful thing for your readers. Most likely, unless the people reading your blog are subscribed to it or are reading it because they know you, your users reached your blog through the search engines. If that’s the case, after having read what they came to your blog looking for, having a list of other relevant posts can greatly increase the chances of them staying around and enjoying your other posts. This will increase your readership and potentially convert these new visitors into subscribers.

The other reason to add related post links is because interlinking pages on your site is a big deal for SEO and properly doing so can greatly increase the chances for the search engine spiders to successfully crawl your site. If you’re looking to crow your traffic organically, that’s obviously a really big deal.

Now, having to manually add a list of links to the bottoms of your posts is tedious and pretty dumb. So how do you do it automatically?

Solution

The plugin that solves this problem is hands down one of the smartest plugins I’ve ever used. Download Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and active it. The way this plugin works is it calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog and caches those results. It does this by considering all of the relevant parts of a post in a special algorithm that decides how similar two posts are. You are able to decide exactly what options are considered when the program calculates related posts.

Then, after you write a new post and view it on your site, the plugin will display the 3 most relevant related posts on your site as links after the body of your post. Over time, the algorithm will get smarter and smarter as it has more and more content to work with.

The one caveat for this plugin is that you won’t see super accurate results until you have written a good amount. Initially, the plugin will either say that it hasn’t found any similar posts or that it has only found 1 or 2. You can mess with the “Match Threshold” in the settings to get better results, or if you just wait a little while you will begin to see better results as the amount of content on your site increases.

 

Related posts:

1. Automatically Generate and Submit an XML Sitemap with Every Wordpress Post
2. Generate Link to Wordpress Home Page with the bloginfo Function
3. Slowly Building Traffic