Similar Posts For SEO Success
July 7, 2008 By: Justin | 4 commentsIt’s no secret that a related post plugin will make your site stickier while also improving your site’s SEO by internally linking to other posts. Today I installed a new related post plugin called Similar Posts. I really like it, so I thought I’d talk about it and share why I think it is useful.
(The reason I went looking for a new plugin is because the old one wouldn’t show excerpts correctly)
Benefits Of Similar Posts Plugin
Internal Linking
Internet linking is great for on site SEO. It cross links posts, creates post relationships, helps with keyword association internally, and decreases your site depth. This makes it easy for Google to crawl, index, and related your posts.
Provided Related Content
Sounds kind of like duh, right? Well, its a great way to make your site sticky. When a person finishes reading your post, you’re able to quickly direct them to other content that may interest them. They move on to another post and stick around (and maybe subscribe).
Contextual Internal Linking
I really like being able to pull a blurb of text to place with the links. When Google looks at a link, it checks the anchor text and surrounding text. Surrounding the link with related keyword rich content helps Google determine the context and authority of the link. Links in content carry more weight than lists of links. These are internal links, but authority and PR can be pass around internally, so I want to do the best I can to set up links of the highest quality.
The Long Tails
Having 3 to 5 chunks of content added at the end of each post adds a niche chunk of content to every post. This adds keywords that wouldn’t normally be present and reinforces keywords already in the post. I might get lucky and get indexed for a keyword that is a combination of keywords from this post and posts that show up as related posts. Nothing wrong with more content, Google loves it.
Get the Plugin
So go get the Similar Posts plugin. No real need for me to post a how to, they have a pretty good help page. You can see mine below this post to see how I structured my output. The plugin has a ton of options. If you have any questions or problems getting it to work, just let me know.
note: You’ll need to install the Post-Plugin Library, to get the Similar Post Plugin to work.
Tagged With plugin, related post, SEO, similar post, Wordpress, wordpress pluging
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For me it’s a trade off between too much clutter at the end of posts vs. showing the full excerpt and more and getting some SEO benefit.
Right now I’m using the Random Posts plugin on OpTempo which just shows titles as kind of a trade off. Since the selection is random, not related, this has resulted in some interesting connections between pages plus interesting comments on older posts that popped up on this list.
Yeah, I thought about the random post plugin to see how it works. I assume it would help a little with the freshness factor since a section of content is constantly changing, plus the keyword combination get more interested.
The huge separation b/t the post and comments is annoying and it does create a lot of clutter.
In the future, when the blog has more authority, I may consider removing it. I wanted to improve the number of people I pull in from organic results.
Another option is placing the related posts output below the comments. Could stick all the clutter at the bottom of the site.
There is a new SEO plug in for onsite linkbuilding. SEO ROI has a post on June 30th 2008.
Thanks for the heads up Nathan, I’ve seen a few like that in the past but never used them. I’m going to give Gabriel’s plugin a try.