Contextual Related Posts Plugin Review

July 1, 2009 by Brie

For those of you looking to increase your search engine rankings, internal linking within your own blog is an absolute must. Contextual links, (links containing keywords within a sentence) are among Googles favorites in their now common use of latent semantic indexing (LSI). However, imagine the work ahead of you if you have a number of archived posts not yet linked to each other. The thought of linking to other posts on your blog, depending on the size of your archive, can be overwhelming.

Contextual linking is just another way to make your site a bit more Google-friendly. If you are using Wordpress 2.5 or higher, help is as close as a plugin. The best plugin that I have found to make the job of contextual linking a lot less daunting is Ajay D’Souza’s Contextual Related Posts Wordpress plugin.

This great little plugin allows you to choose the number of related posts that you want to display and whether you want to do it automatically. The article does not even need to be tagged for the plugin to do its magic. In addition, the Contextual Related Posts plugin also allows you to determine what pages or posts from specific categories that you may want to exclude.

If you have no related posts to display, you will be given the choice of displaying “No Related Posts” or having nothing appear at all. Your grouping of related posts will automatically be added to the bottom of each post, without having to add any coding to your template whatsoever.

Head over to http://ajaydsouza.com/wordpress/plugins/contextual-related-posts/ and download the plugin. Extract the zip files and upload it to the plugins folder. Activate and configure it to your liking by following the assistance given on the plugin download page.

Related post contextual linking simply doesn’t get much easier than this.