A big question that many bloggers are faced with is the question of how to keep readers on your site once they get there. Nothing sucks more than writing hundreds of awesome blog articles, having a reader visit your site, read the article they linked to, and then disappearing from your site. Instead, you want readers to arrive at your site and stay there. So, in this article, I’m going to show you a very simple way of keeping your readers on your site and adding a little extra content to each blog post while you’re doing it.
For this to work, you’re gonna need to be running WordPress as your blog tool of choice. It also helps if you already have several blog articles written. To begin, log into your WordPress admin console and click on “Plugins > Add New”. Do a search for “Efficient Related Posts”. You can also manually download it from here. When you find it, go ahead and install & active it. This is a pretty cool plugin that automagically adds a list of related articles to the current article page. By doing this, the titles from the related articles provide a little more content for your page which the search engines love to see.
By including a list of related articles, this will provide the reader a chance to visit other pages on your blog instead of heading for the door and leaving your site. But, this only helps if you choose a good place to list the related posts. Personally, I’ve found that the best place to include these lists are directly after the article content itself. That way, when readers finish reading the article, they are immediately presented with a list of other articles they might enjoy on your site. If they see something they like, they’re very likely to click on that link and stay on your site. The cool thing is, once they click on a related post and read that article, they are again presented with another list of related articles. And so, the circle begins, err…. repeats? Continues?
Anyways, there are several different methods you can use to include the necessary code for displaying the related posts. For instance, one way you can display the list of related articles is by manually including the following line of code into the HTML of your articles:
[relatedPosts title=”Related Posts” num_to_display=”5″]
You can change the title to whatever you want it to be. You can also decide how many related posts you want displayed. When using the code above on this site, I end up with something like this:
Related Posts
But, why would anyone want to have to manually copy that line into every individual post? That just seems like a huge waste of time to me. So, for this site, I’ve decided to go with a more permanent approach. I’ve decided to modify my “single.php” page so that related articles are included on every blog entry by default without me having to do any work. To do that, I opened up my “single.php” page found in my theme folder and included the following code:
<?php do_action('erp-show-related-posts', array('title'=>'Related Posts', 'num_to_display'=>5)); ?>
Pretty simple, huh? I just copied the line above and pasted it between the code for “wp_link_pages();” and the code for “the_bookmark_links();”. By the way, “the_bookmark_links();” is another plugin I have installed. So, don’t worry about it if you don’t see that in your code. If not, just paste the code above after the code for “wp_link_pages();”.
If you want to change how the plugin operates, log into your WordPress admin console and go to “Settings > Related Posts”. From there, you can choose how you want the default title to appear, what you want the text to say when there are no related posts found, and even select certain categories to ignore.
This plugin is actually an enhanced version of a similar plugin, but better. The reason I say it is better is because the other plugins build this list of related articles every time a page view is requested. This causes a lot of extra processor cycles & database calls. Because of that, the webpage seems to take a little longer to load and the last thing we want is for our pages to load slowly. Instead, this “enhanced” plugin builds the list of related articles when you save the article after edit.
But, what about articles that I already written? Do I have to go back and re-save all of my existing articles in order for this list to be generated? Nope! That’s why at the beginning of this article I mentioned that it’s a bonus if you already have existing articles for the plugin to select from. So, once again, go to the “Related Posts” plugin settings page and this time, scroll to the bottom. There you will see a section called “Build Relations”. You can check any of the checkboxes to be processed if you want, but you don’t have to. I didn’t. All you really need to do is click the button that says “Process Posts / Pages” and let the plugin do its magic. You’ll see a warning telling you that this action might take a very long time to run, but I didn’t have any issues with it. It generated related articles for every post on this site in less than 1 second. But, different results will vary.
Anyways, if you did everything correctly, you should see a list of “Related Posts” on every article on your site. If not, leave a comment below and I’ll personally help you figure out what went wrong. But, I have complete confidence in you. I also know that by doing this, you’ll begin seeing readers stay on your site longer than you did before.
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