Wordpress Tutorial - Adding Similar Posts

Wordpress is a fantastic platform for creating affiliate sites.  One of the things I get asked about a lot is how to add a similar posts section to your pages. 

Similar posts have a couple of benefits for your site. 

1. Add relevant content to the end of your posts, highlighting other relevant content your visitor may be interested in.  This increased the stickiness of your site, keeping visitors on site.
2. Linking to other relevant content can help boost your search engine rankings.  Not only does the page linking out get a boost (because the search engines love this type of relevant linking), but the pages being linked to get a boost, as they receive more incoming links.

Similar posts is easy to implement using a Wordpress plugin called “Similar Posts”.  Install it like you would any other plugin.  If you need help, read my tutorial on installing Wordpress plugins.

Once installed, you’ll have access to a number of Similar Posts options in the “Settings” menu.

There is a menu across the top that you can explore, but the one setting I think you should enable for SEO purposes is the one in the screenshot below:

Making sure that the similar posts “Match the current post’s category”, will mean that the similar posts will all be related to the page they appear on.  If you do not enable this option, you will have links to unrelated content appearing in the list.  You might want to explore the “Output” menu as this will give you options on how your similar posts appear.

OK, with similar posts installed and ready, you now need to add some code to your templates.

The exact template you need to edit depends on your template set.  Have a look at the Wordpress template hierarchy diagram.  This will tell you which template is responsible for which page on your site.  e.g. to add similar posts to a post page, that diagram tells you that you need to edit the single.php template if it exists, and if not, either create that file using the index.php as a “template”, or just edit the index.php file.

Edit the template in a text editor, and add the following code to the template at the point in your page where you want the similar posts to appear:

<?php similar_posts(); ?>

Here you can see it in my Affiliate Minder site’s index.php template:

You will notice that I have added an H1 header right before the similar posts will appear.  This is what my final page looks like in a browser:

The most difficult part of adding similar posts to your page is to find the right point to insert the similar post code into your template.  Don’t worry too much about this.  Keep a backup of the original template, and play.  After uploading, if the template is screwed up, or the posts do not appear where you want them, simply restore the backup and try again.

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