Want a quick way to double your pageviews?
When a reader comes to the end of a blog entry, do you want him to leave your site? Or view another article?
Chances are, if he was interested enough in the current post to open it up, he’s likely to be interested in other posts on the same subject. But people are naturally lazy. They won’t be bothered to search through your archives on the off chance that there might be a similar article that you wrote before.
Much better to simply show your reader a list show a list of posts that are related to a given post. It’s too hard and time-consuming to manually come up with a list, though. Not to mention the fact that your archive of articles is constantly changing.
The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
So it’s much easier (and better) to use a plugin for this purpose. There are a number of related posts plugins, but I wanted one which:
- Is easy to use. One related posts plugin actually requires manual database updates.
- Is used by a lot of people. (The more popular a plugin is, the more likely it is to be updated and not abandoned.)
- Doesn’t require any changes to your template.
- Customizable.
YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) fits the bill here. You can use it simply by installing it. You don’t have to do anything else (although you can for customization).
In this post, I’ll walk through a simple installation of YARPP, and some light customization.
Installing YARPP
YARPP installs like any other WordPress plugin hosted on wordpress.org. Just go to your administration panel, search for YARPP, click to install.
YARP works by matching post titles, body text, tags, and categories.
If you look at a post to check out YARPP working, you’ll likely see some numbers by the post titles:
WordPress YARPP Default View
These are the match scores (the degree of relatedness between the current post and the related post). These are only show if the logged-in user is an administrator. Your readers won’t see them.
Customizing YARPP
YARPP works right out of the box, and if you don’t want to anything more, you don’t have to.
But you can also
- Disallow posts from certain categories or tags from being shown in the related list
- Show only posts no older than a specified number of months
- Increase or decrease the weight given to post titles, body text, tags, and categories in matching one post to another.
- Show or not show related posts for the main site, and again for your RSS feed.
- Show or not show a small excerpt of the related articles
- Use a custom template file for the related posts list
One thing that I did change was the default HTML that wraps the related posts list.
By default, it is:
Related posts: <ol></ol>
The default “Related posts” text looks too small for the reader to even notice.
I changed it (i.e., the text right after “Before / after related entries display:”)
WordPress YARPP Wrap Options
to:
<h2>Related posts:</h2> <ol></ol>
This makes the “Related posts” into a level 2 heading (H2), big enough to grab the reader’s attention:
WordPress YARPP H2 Heading
Check out the changes
Log out and view a couple of your posts the way readers will:
WordPress YARPP Related Posts as the User Sees Them
If your option changes don’t work:
- Be sure you’ve saved changes
- Be sure you’re changing the options for website articles, not for RSS.
You should notice the results right away.
Whereas before, people would come to the blog, read an article, and go away, I’ve noticed that now, they will often click one or even two related articles. The rate at which people leave your site after coming to it is called your bounce rate, and you should see it drop.
Resources
http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress/yarpp-best-related-posts-plugin-for-wordpress.html
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-related-posts/
http://epicalex.com/yarpp-templates/
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Many thanks for the information. I enjoyed reading it. You have a very well-designed blog.
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