Internet Marketing Strategies

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Keep your Readers Happy: Make it Easy for Them to Find Your Posts

It is fairly easy to get visitors to your blog from a link on another website or a search engine listing, but it’s just as easy to lose your new visitor when they find it difficult to find related information on your blog. The default WordPress installation is not visitor friendly, and the historical archives are a complete waste of time… Offer your visitors an easy way to find similar posts to the one they are currently reading, and don’t make it difficult to find other information.

In the previous chapter we discussed the concept of linking related posts together and not leaving them isolated. Here are a few more ideas:

1) Display a site search utility

Internet users are becoming savvier and many people are comfortable using a blog search facility if you make one available. WordPress comes with a fairly simple search facility which most blog themes will incorporate.

When you first start your blog the WordPress search facility will be quite adequate, but as your number of posts increases you will need to enhance your WordPress blog search results by using the Search Reloaded Plugin by SemioLogic which uses an advanced search algorithm.

2) Display a list of related posts

If your reader reads your entire blog post, there’s a very good chance they will want more information, so offer them a list of related posts at the end of each blog post. You can accomplish this by using the modified Related Posts plugin from Peter Bowyer. He has enhanced the original plugin by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu because the original plugin did not always display decent results. Additionally, using the keyword option to identify related posts meant having to edit all previous posts.

The modified plugin takes the post content, and calculates word frequency using weightings for different parts of the post (eg URL, title, content). It then matches these against your WordPress database, and returns results which are more relevant.

The downside of this plugin is that it is not supported, but it does work with WorPress 2.1

The three advantages of this plugin are:

- It is simple to install.
- It will work correctly with existing posts.
- It gave the most relevant results of all the plugins I tried.

3) Display a list of the most read posts

In your blog side bar you could list a number of your most popular posts. If people find a post interesting it makes sense improve the post’s exposure and make it available to every visitor to your blog.

The bsuite plugin by Casey Bisson will display (among other things) a predetermined number of popular posts based on the number of times it has been read.

4) Display a list of recent posts

Perhaps not as important as the previous three points, but if your blog is a news type blog then the most recent posts will be current news and of interest to your readers. The easiest way to display recent posts is to use the Fuzzy Recent Posts plugin from Semiologic.

Stay tuned tomorrow as I  will be talking about “going away and still leaving posts.”

To YOUR Success,

Alejandro Reyes
skype:  whoisalejandro

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