The longer your site visitors stay around, the better.
It improves the stats that Google track – time spent on your website is one of the factors and they can track that for Chrome users as well as for the length of time before someone clicks the back button to re-check the search results.
It’s called stickiness and some SEO types call short stays on your website the bounce rate (how fast people bounce away from your site).
You can add links in your posts, Wikipedia style. Providing you remember each time you add a post. I’ve not yet searched for a plugin to do that but there’s probably one around and it’s on my “to do” list.
And you can put related links on posts.
WordPress has lots of plugins that help encourage people to explore more of your site.
One of the oldest is the Yet Another Related Post (YARPP) plugin.
That works well for a lot of sites but because of the way my site is set up (I have some product download pages on it) I found that it was awkward for me to use and ran the risk of accidentally linking to download pages for paid products.
Not something I’d like to happen.
So I searched and found another plugin – I’ve linked to it here:
This gives me the option to globally exclude WordPress Pages rather than remembering to set some extra field so that YARPP doesn’t show them.
I prefer easy things as I’m more likely to do them.
There are lots of settings – if you’ve got images on your pages, the plugin will even use a thumbnail to help draw people’s attention to the links.
It’s easy to set up, the defaults are sensible and you can tweak them if you prefer.
And these kind of links help keep people on your website longer.
You can see how the text-only version of Contextual Related Posts works below this post.