I moved my blog to a self hosted WordPress blog about a year and a half ago. It was a great move of course – the flexibility and control is amazing. I would never go back to a hosted blog like blogger or blog.com.
Over time I had been producing quality and catchy content. When I moved to WordPress and a new design I noticed I was getting more traffic. Eventually I was getting a pretty decent flow of traffic – at least for my uses. I wasn’t using this site to sell – purely a hobby. Even having a couple hundred visits a day was making me happy.
I monitor my website analytics a lot…probably too much. I noticed a troubling trend. Although my visits were at an all time high and continually rising, the time spent on page and page views per visit were pretty low. Very low in fact. Time on site was ranging from only a minute to two minutes max. Pageviews per visit were sitting at around 1.23. Not good at all. Today World Info
I needed a solution. The first thing I thought of was my internal linking was weak. I needed an easy way to deal with this. I thought that a related posts plugin would be a great start. These plugins add a list of links to your related posts at the bottom of your current post. I tried a couple of them but I really didn’t like the fact that the plugin automatically choose the posts to link between. I am a control freak..I wanted more!
I kept looking until I found MicroKids Related Posts Plugin. This was the solution! First of all the plugin is simple to use, barely any options to deal with and offers me the control I want.
MicroKids adds an additional field to your WordPress Visual Editor page – right under the custom fields area. This field includes a search field that lets you search by your post’s content or it’s title. You will get a list of your posts and you simply click on them to add them to the bottom of the current post you are creating. Simple as that.
Are you wondering if this helped me at all?
Well it certainly did. First off it increased my page views and time spent on site. My page views per visit jumped to 2.38 and the time on my site more than doubled. Those might not be massive numbers but that big an effect for such a small amount of work was great to me.
I also noticed a benefit in the search rankings. I can not confirm it was the plugin, but shortly after I added the post I noticed a bump in my SERPs. Some longtail keywords that I had been ranking near the bottom of page one on Google jumped to middle of page one. My hypothesis is that this plugin created a path for the Google robots that made my posts seem more relevant.
For example I had a post about Ron Artest. Once I added this plugin, I added some related post links to the bottom of the Ron Artest post. These links pointed to other Ron Artest stories I had mentioned. Now when Google finds my Ron Artest post the robots will follow links to other Ron Artest posts. This has to make the content seem more relevant to Google right?