What is Zemanta Related Posts & Why You Need It On Your Site

Hot off the heels of our very exciting launch of our Content Discovery Network, we would like to follow up and go into even more detail as to what exactly the Zemanta Related Posts plugin is - and why you need it on your blog.

We have been in the business of delivering semantically matched related posts for over five years now, and with a network of over 300,000 publishers, there is no denying that many find our tools useful and beneficial to their site. But first, why would anyone want to add related posts to their site? And more importantly, why should you choose us?

There are several reasons why it is beneficial to have related posts on your site. There is a reason why nearly every major publisher is using them. With the advent of content marketing and how important it has become in any digital marketing strategy, I would actually be impressed to find a blog that isn’t using it. After all, why wouldn’t a publisher do anything that they can to keep you reading?

Increased Engagement

One of the most frequently stated benefits of having related posts is the increased engagement and readership that you earn from having them on your site. This is important whether you are a publisher or a brand engaged in content marketing. Even a small boost engagement can go a long way.

Think of how much more likely a reader is to click through to one of your posts that he sees if every time he is on your site he reads two or three articles rather than just reading one and then bouncing. That site recognition goes a long way, especially if you are a beginner blogger battling major news sources, big brands, and tenured publishers.

Less Bounce, More Views

That brings me to two other frequently stated benefits of having related posts: a lower bounce rate and more pageviews.

If more engagement didn’t get your attention, then a boost in traffic most certainly will. I think it’s pretty safe to say that most, if not all, bloggers would love to have more traffic – the search term “how to increase traffic” is searched on Google over 60,000 times a month alone!

According to Search Engine Journal, “Many studies have shown that after a web visitor has finished reading your post, they are in action mode – they want to do something.” This makes sense.

Personally, I know that if I reach the end of a post while I am a visitor of another site and a related post catches my eye, I am very likely to click through. I can actually think of several occasions when I catch myself realizing that I just spent the last 20 minutes reading through posts on a site all because I kept on seeing related, interesting content. And if this happens, not only am I likely to trust the site and recognize it at a later date, but if I really liked the content, then I am likely to subscribe to it – either through social media, email, or RSS.

The Available Options

So now that I have convinced you that you need some kind of related posts on your site, you have two options: either manually insert and format your own related posts, or use an existing, established plugin.

Let’s explore the first option. Sure, it sounds enticing at first, you have full control, you don’t have to rely on a third party service, you have the freedom to make it however you want. While all of these things may be true, there is also a lot of work there. You have to comb through your posts and posts around the web, you have to add them using the proper formatting and CSS, you will need to find, and possibly edit, the featured images that you will use as the thumbnails, and then you need to make sure that it displays correctly in all browsers. Of course, this is all on top of all the research, writing, image searching, and any other work you might do for the blog post itself!

Luckily, we have a solution to all of this, and that comes in a fancy new plugin called Zemanta Related Posts.

Why You Need Zemanta Related Posts

We would like to think that Zemanta Related Posts is the best related posts plugin you’ll find and of course, we have many reasons for that.

More Traffic

I’m going to start with the one that everyone wants to hear, more traffic. And we don’t just do that by keeping users on your site. Nope, we also bring in traffic from other sites that are also using our plugin. This is quality traffic too, because of our semantic technology, all posts to and from your site are going to be related to what you are writing about – increasing the likelihood of the visitor engaging with your post and finding other related articles on your site.

In fact, many users of our plugin experience an internal traffic increase of up to 10%. Not only does this increase your reach and readership of people who otherwise may have never seen your blog, but it places you in a network of similar bloggers that will appreciate the exchange of traffic just as much as you do. Oh, and if you want to check to see how many visitors Zemanta brought you, you can check that directly through the plugin dashboard.

Real-Time Analytics

One thing that many related posts plugins are lacking are analytics. Most people would like to see how many users who make it to the end of your post actually click through to a related post. For that reason, we decided to include real-time analytics directly in the plugin dashboard. Check out a screenshot of our statistics for the past 30 days.

Mobile Optimization

With the rapid adoption and use of mobile browsing, it is more important now than ever to optimize your site for both desktop and mobile use. Thankfully, Zemanta Related Posts are customizable and fully optimized for mobile use, and as you can see above, we even offer you mobile analytics.

Complete Customization

Another benefit of using Zemanta Related Posts is the complete customization that we offer you through the plugin dashboard. It is on your site so we believe that you should have full control of how it looks on your site. That is why we offer seven different designs and, if you really have something special in mind, an option to customize the plain design via CSS.

Check out all six of our awesome designs:

Complete Editorial Control

Last, and certainly not least, is the full editorial control that you get with Zemanta Related Posts. One of the biggest complaints about related posts plugins is that you do not have any control over which posts are actually displayed. We think that it is very important that you, the owner of the site, should have complete control over what is shown on your site. So we made it simple to add or remove any of the related posts that we suggested to you using our semantic engine.

Simply click “Edit Related Posts” in the right corner of the related posts and drag and drop whatever you want. And if you would also like to restrict the posts that we recommend to a certain date range (for example, only posts from the last 3 months), you can do that from the plugin dashboard.

So, what do you think?

By now, I hope I have convinced you that not only are related posts a necessity on your site, but Zemanta Related Posts are the best option. We offer you the ability to get more traffic from our network of over 300,000 bloggers with analytics to prove it, we offer you mobile optimization and full customization, and most importantly we offer you full control to truly make Zemanta yours.