Wordpress Wednesdays: Related Posts

Posted on June 4th, 2008

Chances are that most people who visit your blog have not been there since the beginning. Even if they have been dedicated readers for a long while, they may not be as familiar with some of the gems that are hiding in your archives. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced with visitors who are finding your blog for the first time, whether it be through social media, search engines, or organic backlinks.

To help expose this audience to some of your older posts, it can be valuable to do some internal deeplinking within your current posts. Not too many people are going to take the time to sift through your archives, even if they have been organized with a clean interface, so you have to provide them with related posts on your own. Internal deeplinks can serve this purpose.

Another way to do it is to take advantage of the Related Posts Wordpress plug-in. This inserts a list of related posts at the end of each article, based on the tags and keywords contained within the current post. For example, the post I did on Richmond Night Market gets served with other posts that I wrote on the night market. Presumably, these related posts add value to the reader experience.

Are you encouraging your readers to browse your archives? Are you getting full value out of every post you write, ensuring that these posts still receive traffic long after they have been published?