JMH Techtronics

This plugin has been on my radar for some time now, but until now I hadn’t gotten around to installing it because I wanted to have a few dozen posts in my archives to have a decent amount of content to pull from. Now that I have it I love the way it helps readers find more related articles for my posts such as more Wordpress Plugins when you read a post such as this at the bottom of the entry.

In addition to the help to your readers, this plugin also gives you some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefits as well. Mainly the fact that you are linking to more of your own posts, which in turn helps you get more content indexed in the search engines. This is something you should be doing on a regular basis in posts as well. Take a look at one of my other posts on deep linking and theft sites to see other reasons why I suggest deep linking in all your posts.

The installation isn’t difficult, and is the same as most other plugins, but the set up may be a bit confusing to most who read the documentation that comes with it. (I had a Wall O’ Text of code at the bottom of my posts at first.)

Like most plugins you need to download the plugin zip file for the plugin before you can do anything. This one is one of those where you will want to unzip the file before uploading it most likely so do so. Once you have the folder with the plugin code in it you must then upload the related-posts.php text file into your Wordpress Plugins directory.

That is the easy part. Well..not the easiest. Go to your Dashboard and activate the plugin next which is the easiest part :).

After activating the plugin you will see a “Related Posts Options” tab under the Plugins tab on your Wordpress dashboard. Once you get to this page you should see this:

Go to the very bottom of that page to find: “If this is your first time installing this plugin you will have to run this script (opens a new window) in order to create the index table required by the plugin. If this fails, please refer to the readme on how to create it manually.”. Click on the “This Script” link to create that index table. It only takes a few seconds and it will tell you that it was a success.

Next, you have to decide where you want to display the related posts, as well as pick a catchy title for this section of your blog. For this site I went into my index.php file and found the section under which I have the code for “Enjoy this post? Subscribe to the RSS Feed”. This is under the code:

<?php _e('Filed under:'); ?> <?php the_category(', ') ?> <?php _e('by'); ?> <?php the_author(); ?><br /> <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?> <?php edit_post_link('Edit', ' | ', ''); ?> </p>

on this particular blog as you would be able to see by looking at the elements I have on a full page of posts at the bottom of my posts. Once you decide where you want it to appear you will need to create some sort of title to tell people why you have these links on your page. Don’t forget to do this! You can pick whatever you want for such a title. I chose “Related Entries” for mine. You want these to stand a bit a part from everything else on the page instead of using text that looks like that of the paragraph text in your posts so I used this code: <h3>Related Entries:</h3> to set it a part a bit. The <h3></h3> highlight this text and give it a title feel. Those tags increase the size of the text the LOWER the number so if you were going to use <h1>Related Entries:</h1> the title would be HUGE. That is all up to your personal preference. Once you have that situated, you need to place this code below it so that the posts will actually show up:

<?php related_posts(); ?> This code can be modified various ways, but I used it with the settings I have in the options. If you want more customability look at the link towards the end of this post when I mention customization again.

In addition to the index.php file for inserting this you may have to go into your single.php file as well in order to display related posts for when visitors click on just a single post and not your home page. Same theory applies here as to where you want it as the other file. Phew…the hard part is over.

Now head back into your WP dashboard and back to the options page for the related posts plugin. This time you will want to work with the input fields. The first is self-explanatory. I chose 5 related posts to display, which is the default anyways, but I wasn’t able to get them to display with out entering a value there so you may as well do so as well.

The next part you see is the “Before / After (Post Title) :” part. This has nothing to do with your last post, but it has to do with how the links to your related posts are displayed. If you do nothing with this they will show up as a string of words together and just look silly to your readers so you should enter values here. Take their advice from the example and put <li> in the first box, and </li> in the second. This will display them in list form. Mine are bulleted because that is how my stylesheets for this theme are set up to show lists. Yours will look how your stylesheets have been set up.

Show excerpt? This is all up to you. I went the non-SEO route with mine in favor of a sleaker look, but you may want to show a bit of an excerpt yourself. If so select “True”. If not leave it alone. If you do show an excerpt you must pick the number of characters in the next box and you will have to enter the list tags again because you interrupted the other action by enabling excerpts.

That should be all you have to do now to generally set this up. It does fairly well at finding related posts itself, but if you want to go into more advanced strategies you will want to either read the “Readmefirst.txt” that came in the .zip file, or just visit the plugin creator’s documentation page for the Related Posts Plugin for more detailed descriptions of the code.

Also, please visit my archives for more Wordpress Plugins that I use on this site, or just look at my related entries below this post!

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Filed under: Blogging Tips and SEO, Wordpress Plugins by JMH

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