Related Posts Plugin And SEO
March 6th, 2007 by CourtFirst of all, this entry won’t do you any good unless you’re using WordPress!
For the purpose of today’s lesson, I’ll need to explain a little about how Google ranks pages. Google ranks pages according to how important they look. The main way that Google determines this is by the amount of links that point to a page.
Google uses two types of links when they do this. The first is external links, or the links that come from other websites. The second is internal links, or links from within your site.
Google likes to see a good amount of internal linking in your site. The reasoning behind this is very simple; if there are a lot of internal links in the site, it will be easier for the user to navigate around. For this reason, Google will reward you for having a lot of internal links.
Let me present to you……. the related posts plugin. This is the most important WordPress plugin on earth, at least from an SEO standpoint. At the bottom of every blog entry, the related post plugin shows some related articles in the site, and links to them. This really REALLY will help you from an SEO standpoint. Let me give you two reasons:
- It will really increase the amount of internal linking in your site. As I have already established, this is good.
- It makes pages look more important. Some of your older pages are probably only linked to from one spot in your site. This is a catastrophe because such pages look like a losers to Google. The related post plugin links related pages together, making each look more important and popular.
If you haven’t already installed the related post plugin, I would run and grab it right now! You can get it here. Make sure to backup your database before installing it, this one is a little harder than some of the others!
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March 13th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
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March 23rd, 2007 at 10:22 am
[…] Get More Traffic - Technorati Tags5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Blog About BloggingAVirtualExit.com ReviewedRelated Posts Plugin And SEOTraffic - SEO vs. John ChowDay 3 - 60 Minutes of CardioDay 2 - 60 Minutes of CardioNot Using Permalinks - Search Engine SuicideDay 1 - 60 Minutes of CardioNew 14 Day Trial - 60 Minutes of Cardio Daily […]
April 22nd, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Want to add those related posts to your feed as well? I have a simple little plugin that will help.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:02 am
Now this one is a new find for me! Does it work in WP 2.2?
May 12th, 2007 at 11:38 am
I am going to take your advice and install this plugin now…. I’m also interested to know about the top commentators plugin you have? That’s magic!
May 19th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Hmmm, I’ve been using related posts for awhile now but never thought of it as helping from an SEO standpoint. Thanks for the info Court!
July 7th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Hey Court,
Which related posts plugin do you use?
I’m using Simple Tagging and it’s related post functionality but I’m not finding it very accurate though. It seems pretty quick and the functionality is good though.
Besides that, I think you could add a 3rd point to the list:
3. It adds relevant content to your blog for search engines to crawl.
July 28th, 2007 at 2:12 am
To rapidly boost pagerank, i read at seobook that having every secondary and tertiary page link to each other and the the home page.
Also, keep generating new pages each day. Each page gains new pagerank. By pointing each one to the mainpage, you add pagerank!
August 6th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
My Network Updates
Few Left Standing
I have changed the blog theme again, to something more simple. I installed the All In One SEO Pack plugin for Wordpress, along with the Related Posts plugin. I’ve also installed the Wordpress Auto Updater plugin, which is going …
August 12th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
[…] If you have a blog, you should show posts that are related to the post you’re currently working on. If you have a WordPress blog, WordPress can help you to do this if you use the related posts plugin. […]
August 30th, 2007 at 7:53 am
I will take your advice and install this plugin, but if your blog is really focused on a niche, this plugin will just return random posts.
November 5th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
[…] 1. Related Posts Plugin - Having related posts at the bottom of each of your posts gives you several significant advantages over people that don’t. First, it gives the reader additional information that they can use. Second, it mixes things up for Google and other search engines. The posts that are most closely related to other posts will change over time, refreshing the content on old pages. Third, it increases the amount of linking within your site which will give you better search engine rankings. More on that here: Related Posts Plugin and SEO. […]
November 15th, 2007 at 10:12 am
But isn’t the value of the page (The Google PageRank)that is linking the other pages goes down?
November 15th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
I’ve installed it, but I’m lost as far as using it. Care to give us a more detailed guide at some point? Keep up the great work!
January 1st, 2008 at 7:34 pm
[…] Posts is a fantastic tool for any blog. Related posts strengthen Search Engine Results by magnifying the keywords through links, an important element of Search Engine […]
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:41 am
Can anyone enlighten me on how to get my related posts to form a list? Is there something I need to put in the code? This is what my code is
</p
Thanks!!
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:42 am
related_posts(5, 10, ”, ”, false, false);
Sorry my code didn’t post.
Lisa
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 pm
[…] Posts is a fantastic tool for any blog. Related posts strengthen Search Engine Results by magnifying the keywords through links, an important element of Search Engine […]
January 7th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Here is my experience thus far with the Related Posts Plugin.
I realize some may be humoured when they see all these details since the fix is probably simpler than putting creme in your coffee… but, hey.. no harm asking, right?
The related posts plugin was obtained here:
http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries from their list i used:
related-posts-2.04.zip
I tried the script from the plug in page and it did not work. Per their instructions than it can be configured manually and is supposed to be easy.
So, I opened my phpmyqladmin and opened the correct database and tried altering the code per the readme file in the plug in from the SQL Table.
Using all the characters (code) they provided it did not work but when I stripped some characters it worked from within the mysqladmin.
They suggest:
ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ADD FULLTEXT `post_related` (
`post_name` , `post_content`
)
So, I had to delete these () and the comma and than the database said all was fine… otherwise I only got error pages with the red text showing the syntax error (from inside the admin panel).. This is what I ended up with:
SELECT * FROM `wp_posts` `post_related` `post_name“post_content` WHERE 1 (all on one line) and it worked.
I am not sure if I entered the code correctly or entered it in the correct area. Their instructions are simply to :
4. If automatic creation of a full text index fails. You will have to set it up manually. Don’t worry it’s not hard. Just open your database in phpMySQLadmin and run the following command (cut & paste):
ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ADD FULLTEXT `post_related` (
`post_name` , `post_content`
)
*Note:* You may have to change wp_posts to something else if you are using a different prefix, which is common when you have multiple WP installs running of the same database.
The plugin is called using:
related_posts();
What does it mean to “run the command”?.. Also, where does related_posts(); come into play in all this?
Anyway.. I than went to the main index page and added this:
3. Put somewhere in your WP loop, et voila!
which comes from the readme file. I added to code to various places on that page and ended up with various error messages depending on where I put the code.. So, I placed the code above comments and under content and here is my error message:
WordPress database error: [Can’t find FULLTEXT index matching the column list]
SELECT ID, post_title, post_content,MATCH (post_name, post_content) AGAINST (’welcome to colorado lasik surgery tips’) AS score FROM wp_posts WHERE MATCH (post_name, post_content) AGAINST (’welcome to colorado lasik surgery tips’) AND post_date <= ‘2008-01-07 22:48:46′ AND (post_status IN ( ‘publish’, ’static’ ) && ID != ‘4′) AND post_password =” ORDER BY score DESC LIMIT 3
No related posts
Also, I notice back at the MYsql query tab at the admin panel that the code dissappeared and there did not seem to be a way to save it. So, I am thinking that perhaps I did not place that code in the correct area of the phpmysqladmin area.
January 19th, 2008 at 8:05 am
I am definitely going to take you up on this offer, I have been laid back in optimizing my site of late, but I recently bounced back into action and I will be doing this as soon as possible.
Thanks again Court!
Great content always!
Teen Blogger Fabien
January 21st, 2008 at 6:54 pm
[…] Courtney Tuttle, on her internet marketing school blog, deems this plugin as the “most important WordPress plugin on earth, at least from an SEO standpoint.” […]
March 4th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
[…] Courtney talks about why you need a “Related Posts” plugin here - http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/03/06/related-posts-plugin-and-seo/ – the one she recommends is not the one I’ve suggested here. You can use the one […]
March 17th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Sounds like the all mighty Google is ruling our lives more and more every day, anyway thanks for the advice!
June 10th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Google is everywhere - SEO, AdWords, Reader, Documents, Alerts, Analytics, Notes, Gmail, Orkut.
The list goes on an on. It’s scary the way we have come to depend on the big G!
March 21st, 2008 at 3:22 pm
YARPP (http://mitcho.com/code/yarpp/) also works pretty well for this purpose, I have found. The internal linking is definitely good for Google and other search engines. I’ve had my index page crawled 17 times since I installed this. Thanks for the advice, Court!
March 22nd, 2008 at 2:41 pm
[…] that can make a big difference in how your links are crawled and indexed by search engines. As Court […]
June 12th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Hey, Court.
Firstly, great content on the related posts plug-in. Quick question, do you do the actual programming for this related post plugin or do you out source it? Second question, is my first question none of my business?
Am I blind? I cannot find the actual DOWNLOAD link for the “related posts plugin” link, which is why I am wondering if I need to search deep in your site because. “it’s there…somewhere” or if I need to go to some WP developers/geeks tech website for it? Curious.
Daniel Tetreault
July 17th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I have found Aizatto’s Related Posts to be much better. Don’t need to enter any code or tinker with the database. Just enable and set the options and related posts show up below the post.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
your article is much more informatics for all of the visitor. I am very happy to read it. Thank you for it.
August 28th, 2008 at 9:05 am
I have nothing to say but thanks for your excellent article, continue ur great work!
September 8th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
[…] Related Posts Plugin And SEO […]
September 10th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Very cool plugin. Thanks for the tip.
October 21st, 2008 at 9:57 am
[…] Related Posts Plugin And SEO (tags: blogging, SEO wordpress2.5) […]
November 14th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I will use this plugin on my blog. Never thought of related posts helping out my SEO efforts.
December 22nd, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I used this plugin successfully on an older veriosn of Wordpress. I’ve just started using 2.7, installed the plugin and found that the old “options” option for tweaking plugins has gone. How do you do it? There seems to be no way of getting at plugin options….
July 4th, 2009 at 2:04 am
Informative posting..thank you. I’ll use it in my blog
Regards,
4 Column Blogspot Magazine Templates
January 31st, 2010 at 9:05 pm
I usually post at WordPress . But I’m not understand that after I post comment , that page ’s PR grow down ( PR4 -> PR n/a) who answer for me !!!!Thank you very much