In order to attract more people to your blogs, you need to make them user and search engine friendly.

One way to do this is to list related posts for each of your post so that your readers may stay longer in your blog to read related posts if they find your original post interesting. Even though your readers may have read them before, having a list of related posts can remind your readers and also yourself what you have said.

Thanks to Wasabi’s Related Entries WordPress Plugin which outputs a series of related posts based on keyword matching. Without it, bloggers have to find related posts manually which is very time consuming. The Plugin allows you to set how many related posts to display, whether to display excerpts and how many words are for excerpts, and whether to show password protected posts. The performance of the plugin is quite good. For example, in my post Make Money Online & Highly Recommended Money Makers, it found these related posts:

• BidVertiser Offers Way to Monetize RSS/ATOM Feeds
• Sign Up for TTZ Media and Win One of Two 22″ Monitors
• Make Money Online with BidVertiser
• Make Money Online with Text Link Ads
• Make Money Online with Auction Ads and Get an Instant $25

It is easy to install the plugin and the instructions are good. However, I have found one thing that the author said incorrectly. This is from the readme file:

Starting with version 2.0 you can just use the options page to customize the look and output. However you can use the following guide to edit the paremeters manually if you wish.

<?php related_posts($limit, $len, ‘$before_title’, ‘$after_title’, ‘$before_post’, ‘$after_post’, $show_pass_post, $show_excerpt); ?>

$limit - No. of related entries to display. (Defaut: 5)
$len - Desired excerpt length (no. of words). (Default: 10)
$before/after_title - Text to insert before/after the title section.
$before/after_post - Text to insert before/after the post exceprt section, if displayed.
$show_pass_post - Toggle show/hide password protected posts. (Default: False)
$show_excerpt - Toggle show/hide excerpts. (Default: False)

Example: <?php related_posts(5, 10, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’, ”, ”, false, false); ?>

Result: Will display an unordered list (output is ordered based on keyword matches) of a maximum of 5 “related” posts.

I have tried the approach of editing the parameters manually by using the example found in the readme file, but no related posts showed up in my blog. So, I just followed the simple approach of customizing through the options page and putting

<?php related_posts(); ?>

in single.php. Then related posts showed up successfully.

After I used the plugin, I found that many older posts had been read. If you want to have more blog traffic, you should install this plugin.

If you have any questions regarding to the plugin, feel free to ask in my comment area and I am happy to assist you.

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Last week, I talked about TTZ Media in the post Sign Up for TTZ Media and Win One of Two 22″ Monitors.

I hope you have already signed up for TTZ Media to get your chance to win one of two 22″ monitors. If you have not done so, you can do it here.

As I said in my last week’s post, TTZ Media has a lot of advantages over other ad networks. However, it is quite hard to insert TTZ Media’s ads on a post by post basis if you would like to have different custom keywords for different posts.

Thanks to the new WordPress plugin from Karol Krizka. He has written a great plugin TTZ Media Product Showcase which lets you insert a TTZ Media’s ad into a post with your own custom keywords. This plugin is especially useful for publishers who review or write about a lot of different kinds of products. You can go to his plugin web page to find out more about this plugin and download it.

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Google Analytics makes it easy for us to learn more about where our visitors come from and how they interact with our website. Also, it is the best one we can get for free.

However, according to the documentation from Google Analytics, we need to copy and paste tracking code into all of the web pages we would like to track. It would be very inconvenient if we followed this documentation.

Fortunately, we can make use of the Google Analytics plugin from Semiologic to put the tracking code automatically for us. Installing it is very similar to installing other Wordpress plugins. All you need to do is to follow the simple installation procedures specific to this plugin. Because it takes some time to collect enough data to create your website report, if you just create an Google Analytics account, you need to wait for about one day in order to see your report.

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