Image by .imelda

Building on our 5 super SEO plugins post we’ve compiled a list of 5 Wordpress plugins to increase the stickiness of your blog.

Many blogs suffer from huge web traffic spikes and falls, as their content goes hot on social media sites only for the resultant visitors to come and go just as quickly. These 5 plugins will help to improve that situation by allowing visitors to discover the rest of your content more easily:

1) Similar Posts Plugin

First up, and perhaps the most obvious plugin, is the Similar Posts Plugin.

It’s extremely effective at encouraging your visitors to visit other areas of your blog and also has SEO benefits, as discussed in our SEO plugins article:

It allows you to display a list of similar posts to the one currently being viewed, with this similarity being judged based on page title, content, tags, or a customised combination.

At this point it’s worth giving an honorary mention to the Most Popular Posts plugin, which tracks the number of views, comments and trackbacks to determine your most popular posts. This is an excellent plugin for new visitors but doesn’t tend to increase stickiness amongst those people who have visited your blog previously as they’re likely to have already checked out your most popular posts.

2) Random Posts Plugin

Officially termed Random Categories with Random Posts this plugin does exactly what the name suggests - it displays a list of random posts. Every time a visitors visits another page on your blog a new list of random posts is displayed.

This plugin allows visitors to discover other areas of your blog, something that the Similar Posts Plugin can struggle to achieve as it always displays posts on the same topic.

If your blog which has variably post quality this plugin may not be for you, but if you have a lot of high quality content buried deep in the archives it’s a great way to make it available to visitors.

3) Posts Match Search Query:

When it comes to displaying posts which are targeted to the individual visitor there are few better plugins than the Post Match Search Query plugin.

When visitors are referred to your blog through search engines you can be sure that they’re looking for something fairly specific. That information won’t always be available on the web page that they land on, which is where this plugin comes in. It displays related posts from your blog depending on the visitor’s search query, helping to mould your blog around each individual visitor’s interests.

4) Ajax Comment Posting

Moving away from content customization plugins we come to the Ajax Comment Posting plugin. Its main feature is that it allows users to post a comment without the page refreshing, although it does also ensure that you’ve filled in all the fields on the form correctly.

Anything that makes posting comments more user-friendly has got to be a good thing. Comments are becoming increasingly integral to the interest level of a blog and for many popular blogs the actual article itself can be seen as the conservation initiator, with the comments being the place where the debate rages.

This plugin will make commenting easier, hopefully encouraging more people to leave comments, all adding to the appeal of your blog.

5) Smart Archives

This is a basic, yet highly effective, plugin. Smart Archives displays your archive section in a much cleaner format by displaying all posts in chronological order, with all the links being hyperlinked. Check out the Smart Archives plugin in action.

This is one plugin that we will certainly look to add here at PiggyBankPie. You only have to look at our Guest Blogging Archive and compare it to the archive section linked to above to see which one is more appealing to visitors.

That’s it - the five plugins which will help to increase your blog’s stickiness. Do you know of any more useful plugins? Feel free to go ahead and mention them in the comments below.

_____

Don’t miss a post in 2008, subscribe to receive PiggyBankPie’s articles by Email. Using an RSS reader? Subscribe to our Full RSS Feed.