14 powerful wordpress post recommendation plugins

Posted by Ali Qayyum | Comments off

Post recommendation helps to engage readers and show them what else is worth their reading time. It is also very useful in terms of on site SEO by cross linking relevant content with one another. This is especially so when you have a large site and hundreds of articles.

You can of course do this linking yourself but on a large website, it will take up a lot of your time. Hence, wordpress post recommendation plugins become very useful. They automate such matters by using keywords and categories to help recommend relevant content to your readers.

Here are some of the best recommendation plugin for wordpress. Most of them are free so you have no reason not to use them 🙂

#1: Author recommended posts plugin

Author recommended posts plugin allows you to select which articles are related. Once the plugin makes the recommendation, you can easily change the posts that you think are not so relevant via a drop and drag interface. Easy to use and is quite accurate. The only drawback is that the developer is not actively upgrading the plugin so it might run into issues down the road when the wordpress framework upgrades.

#2: Wripl

Wripl uses a sidebar widget to show what your readers should read next based on the current article they are reading. It is an elegant and effective way to recommend content. Although there are no reviews of this yet, I have tested it and it works well. Try it and let us know if this work for you.

#3: Easy related post plugin

Easy related post plugin is quite established among wordpress users and for good reasons too. It is a really useful plugin that resizes the images in your articles and uses them as thumbnails in the recommended area. You can have a few choices of inserting your recommended articles, which gives you flexibility in your layout choices.

#4: Primal for wordpress

Primal works slightly different from other recommended post plugins. Rather than your own articles, it can pull in relevant content from around the web that is related to the article you are viewing.

#5: Related posts by Zemanta

Zemanta is a ycombinator startup that focuses on generating recommended content based on their algorithm. What it will do is to recommend relevant content from other websites to your visitors and vice versa. In this way, not only can you surface more interesting things for your readers, it will also help to draw in visitors from other websites.

#6: Where did they go from here

This plugin uses a different approach to recommending content. Rather than articles, it focuses on readers who are alike. Hence, instead of recommended articles, you will see a list of links that says “readers who read this, also read this”. Sorry for the image above. There is no screenshot of the app so I took an image from the developer’s personal blog.

#7: Cross promotion content recommendations by Engageya

Engageya’s recommended post plugin recommends both your content as well as content from other related bloggers. Like-wise, your articles will also show up in other websites which uses Engageya.

#8: Reverb for publishers

Reverb for publishers has one of the more sophisticated recommendation engine as it scans your entire blog and use content graphing to map out which article is the most relevant. You can also select content from trusted sources that you wish to show your readers.

#9: Content.ad

Content.ad has a powerful feature you might like: it allows you to make money! This plugin not only can recommend relevant content from your own site but it also displayed sponsored content from advertisers. You earn based on how much impressions your website can generate. Pretty nice!