Importance of Related Posts By Category in WordPress

We all must have seen realted posts being displayed on almost every popular site. Either they are displayed with sweet little thumbnails and titles or just titles with list view. Ever wonder why these popular sites promote related posts on their each page/post?

Here are some of the top reasons for displaying related posts on your site

1. Keeps your visitor busy: This is the top most reason of having related or similar post displayed after each post. A new visitor will never land on the home page of your site. They will always come to your site on some internal post or page through search engine or referals. So once they are finished reading the landing article, they should not get the feeling “What Next?“. Related posts at the end of each article exactly serve this purpose for your visitor and keeps him busy on your site.
2. Related Post by Category: Now why you should display posts from the same category? Firstly, if the visitor lands on one particular page, he is more interested in all the topics related to that category. Apart from that displaying related posts by category algorithm is very fast and efficient. It does not have to scan through all your posts from all the categories to display the results. There are plenty of plugins on related posts which uses different algorithms to come out with the results. But they forget the most important factor, SPEED. After Panda update, the loading speed is an important factor in determining the PR. So you dont want to unnecesarily increase your loading time by scanning through hundreds of posts on your site and displaying the closest related few. Hence Related Posts By Category serves the purpose.
3. Favours SEO : By displaying related posts you are internally linking your posts to each other. So when search engine spider crawls your web, it will crawl through the linked articles in related posts as well. Internal Linking is one of the important factor of SEO to improve your SERP. People often concentrate on external backlinks but forget the internal links. So displaying Related post by category serves the purpose.

I have recently written a plugin for Related Post by Category with Thumbnails which serves the above purpose. It is simple, faster and efficient. Also search engine optimised to improve your internal linking.

Google Panda to check on content farms

Google has launch a major algorithmic change to get rid of content farms and improve the quality of search results. This will bring upon a considerable change in the ranking of existing websites and approximately 11.8% queries are affected by this change. The algorithm to rank website is named as Google Panda or Farmer update.

Will Google Panda aka farmer update affect your website ranking? How will this affect your online business? Do you need to change your online marketing strategy to incorporate the changes introduced by the Panda algorithm? The answer is yes if you have used black hat SEO or content farms to improve your rankings. The algorithm has basically targeted black hat SEO and will ensure that only quality contents with in-depth research getting higher rank.

The algorithm will check the source of the back links coming to your site. So a backlink from a more authoritative site will have more weight than some low ranking website. Also the age of the link to your site is a key factor in determining the page rank. The older the link the more weight and PR juice it will transfer to your site. So sites with short-term paid links will have to say bye-bye. That strategy will no longer work in long-term.

So how will you cope with this change and any further changes that google will introduce to page rank algorithm? The answer is simple, focus more on writing high quality contents on your site. Keep the user in mind and try to write something that will help user and he will love to visit your site again and again. Employ genuine search engine optimisation technique rather than relying on content farms or black hat SEO.

This is just a beginning towards getting quality contents in the search results. The future will keep targeting spam sites and black hat SEO and Google will try to fill all the loopholes in the coming time.

Little Master Sachin Tendulkar does it again

We are still basking in the glory of winning a world cup after 28 years. The achievement was incredible and India started as favourites right from word go. All eyes were on Master blaster Sachin Tendulkar as it is considered to be his last world cup. Serving the nation (in form of playing cricket) for more than 20 years, this glory of winning a world cup was missing from his list of achievements. So the question was whether Team India do it for little master?

And the dream of billions came true with Dhoni lifting the word cup for team India. All the players were in tear and tough guys like Bhajji and Yuvraj were seen crying. This shows how much this victory meant to the entire team. Sachin once again was the highest scorer for team India in the world cup which came as no surprise. Though little master’s contribution was not much in the final but he played a crucial knock in the semi final against Pakistan. His effort of scoring 85 runs batting first won him the man of the match award in semi finals. No one from both the sides of the team could go past 50 runs in that match. It was his day and he was lucky 4 times in that match with Pakistan fielders dropping catches all over the field.

The good thing about this win was the team effort. We were no longer dependent on just one person or two to win the matches for us. Everyone played their part and chipped in with useful contribution. So the entire tournament was played in the right spirit of team sport.

Now that the world cup is over, we thought HIS hunger for runs must be over. But in just 4 days, IPL started and all players were seen playing against each other through different franchises. Tendulkar is leading Mumbai Indians since last 3 season and this will be his fourth season with them as a captain. Last year, Mumbai Indians were very close of winning the title and reached the finals with extreme ease. They were in supreme form and were tipped to win the final as well. But Dhoni’s Chennai Super King spoil the party last year.

This year, Little master is back with a bang and is already the highest run scorer in the tournament so far. His total of 201 in just 3 matches is unmatched by anyone else and still he is to be dismissed in the tournament so far. He earned one more feather to his cap of records by scoring a T20 hundred against Kochi. His hunger for runs seems to be increasing with his age. No one is complaining as we get to see GOD play cricket every time he walks to the crease. Long live the Legend!!