How to Show Related Posts in Wordpress

Many of the new readers to your blog came looking for one piece of information where your blog is listed on the search engines.  Once you have them to your blog, you want to keep them reading, and looking through your posts. But since they came with the intent of reading only one thing, how do you keep them interested?

If you have other related posts, wouldn’t it be great if they could just click a link in the post they are reading to find more information to satisfy their curiosity? As we know, that is not the way our Wordpress blogs work, we would need to search on Google again, or just browse through your posts looking for more information. Once they are back at Google searching again, the chance of us getting them back to our blog immediately is not very high.

You can quickly change Wordpress to add this feature for your readers, keeping readers on your site for a longer time, giving you more opportunity to market to your readers.  The best way to add this feature is to install the Related Posts Plugin for Wordpress.  This plugin adds a box at the end of each of your posts, showing the other related posts on your blog. The plugin determines what articles are related by examining your titles, tags, body, and categories. You can choose which one of these critera are used, or you can use all of them.

The best way to learn more, is to see the plugin in action. Here’s are the steps to install it on your blog:

  1. Login to your Wordpress administration page.
  2. On the left panel, click the tiny arrow on Plugins section then click ‘Add New‘.
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  3. On the search field, type “Yet Another Related Posts” and hit the “Search Plugin” button. Once you see the search result, click “Install” on the “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin“.
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  4. The installation Window will appear. Click the “Install Now” Button to begin the installation.
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  5. Once it’s finish, don’t forget to click “Activate Plugin” to enable the plugin.
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  6. Browse your FTP file, copy the sample templates file on “wp-content/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/yarpp-templates/” into your “/wp-content/themes/default” directory.
  7. Installation finish. You could go to “Settings > Related Posts (YARPP)” to modify the plugin setting based on your needs and your plugin is ready to be used. Check out each of your blog post to see the result.
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The related posts plugin works great for extending Wordpress, and helping your users find more posts, but it is not as powerful and efficient as Google’s search algorithm.  You will need to take a little extra time, making sure the tags for related articles are matched so the posts show up in the related articles list.

Using the related posts plugin is going to keep your readers on your site longer, building more trust, and in the process more sales. Spending the few minutes to install the plugin, and to keep your tags in order, is a small investment for increasing your sales and readership.