If you’ve read anything about SEO, you’ll know that internal linking within your site’s pages is an important element. It is also a good idea to offer links to related articles, especially after the end of every post. This will hopefully lead to the visitor clicking on one of those links and continue surfing your site, rather than just close and cut off the relationship after the first post he landed on.
As usual, WordPress plugins come to our rescue, today we take a look at some amazing plugins that turn a daunting algorithmic job of finding related posts into something very simple.
Here are the best related post plugins for WordPress
nrelate Related Content
nrelate, in our opinion, is the best way to display related content from your site, and/or your blogroll. It has been downloaded more than 139,000 times.
nrelate is not just another related posts plugin. Their patent-pending technology continuously analyzes your website content and displays other related posts from your website. This ultimately leads to higher page-views for your site, and a better user experience for your visitors.
Installing this plugin is as simple as activating it, and you can leave the rest to nrelate. Once activated, the nrelate servers will immediately begin analyzing your website content and associating similar articles. There is also an options page so you can fine tune the display.
Related Content by Wordnik
Related Content by Wordnik (a new plugin with little more than over a 1000 downloads) is more than a simple related posts plugin. It is a new tool for bloggers that increases reader engagement with your content. This plugin uses Wordnik’s proprietary concept graph technology to scan your blog, learn what it’s about, and dynamically display the best related posts. This keeps readers happy and on the site longer, leading to higher page views and more time on site. Best of all, the processing takes place on Wordnik’s servers so your blog doesn’t slow down at all.
Related Content by Wordnik also gives you a direct connection to the Wordnik API, which puts the web’s largest dictionary and thesaurus at your fingertips. Use the power of Wordnik’s word graph to dispel writer’s block and keep your posts fresh and engaging.
YARPP – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
YARPP is by far the most popular related posts plugin for WordPress. It has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times, and is a solid plugin. The only disadvantage of using this plugin, when compared to the previous two, is its high resource usage when running its algorithms. According to Austin Gunter from WP Engine:
“Many related posts plugins work by creating a “FULLTEXT index” on the “posts” table in MySQL. This is a mechanism to make complex queries against the content of posts. For example, “posts which contain A and B but not C or D.” Usually, this means indexing categories, tags, specific keywords, and a number of other data points and querying them later.
It’s a cool way to search, but MySQL wasn’t built to make queries like this.”
YARPP does implement caching to improve performance, and will also work very well on small sites, however, with plugins such as nrelate performing just as well and at a lower performance cost, I recommend using one of the aforementioned alternatives.
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2 Responses
Have you checked out WordPress Related Posts? It shows cool stats and has a ton of features.
Looks good as well, thanks for letting us know.