Trying to get web surfers to stick around is always a battle. You will notice at the bottom of the postings I now have a related postings section. I now list 5 posts that are the most related to the one being read. There is a good chance I have already written another article that a surfer may be interested in.

I think where I placed the 5 related posts section is appropriate. I could put it in the side bar somewhere to try and make it more noticeable, but I'm not sure. I am emulating how John Chow has done his related posts section.

Why Did I Do This

I want more exposure to my articles. My readership is growing and people do not want to take the time to go through the archives looking for content. If they like one of my current articles, then one of the older posts might be of interest to them as well.

Not only do I want to serve them more content to help them out expose my articles, but there is a second big reason for my related posts area.

If I am trying to make money, I should be hoping the user has already left my site because they clicked a link. But the truth of the matter is, they are still on my site and at the bottom of an article. They have already gone past the ads I have set up. If they are going to leave, they will hit the back button and it is back to the Google search page that brought them and they are lost forever.

This is my best guess at the surfer's behavior, because this is what I do. Now, I'm hoping they will see some post titles at the end of the article that interest them and it forces them to take another click and do some more reading. Technically, the loop could be infinite now and they could surf every page in my site.

By including links in your post you also encourage surfers to visit other articles, but it takes a lot of work to go back and maintain older articles. It gets near impossible as your posting count grows. I am over 200 now and don't have the time to go back each post and add in links.

Other Techniques

I did not write a post about it, but I had also added the "Category" field at the top and bottom of my posts around a month ago. This is a quick link to this category's index page. From checking my web tracker stats, these have been used on occasion, so I definitely feel they were worth the change.

How Did I Create Related Posts?

I wrote my own blogging software. I would have been better to just go with WordPress, but I am a software engineer, so doing my own programming helps to keep me involved in the blog and give me more stuff to write about. If you are using WordPress, John Chow wrote an article called Two Tweaks to Generate More Blog Traffic about the plug-in he used.

I used a handy little query option in MySQL. It is the MATCH AGAINST syntax. If you want to have a MySQL search engine, then this would be a quick and dirty way to do it.

Basically, any columns you want to search from a MySQL table should have a FULLTEXT index on them. Then you can use them in your query.

For example: I have a table called posts with the columns title, keywords, and postcontent that have text I want to search. The keywords are a set of strings that I use in my html keywords section for Google to index and I enter them in when I create the post. They are my own description of what the page is about.

After I write out the post content to the page I then do a "related posts" query. It looks like this (in php)

Where $keywords are the keywords for the current post. It can be any string of keywords (without commas, this seems to mess up the search). I also tell the query to not return the current posting (which would always be the number one result). The result will be all the post numbers and titles sorted by correlation descending. I put a LIMIT on there to keep the list small.

It takes the result and creates the links I want on the page. It returns a lot of results, but the top ones are surprisingly closely related. You can even print out the MATCH value to see the number MySQL has calculated as to how closely "related" it is. A number between 0 and 1.

I was thinking if I started a new section where there really wouldn't be any closely related articles that I know of, I could put a limit on what this score can be. For example, only allow ones with a MATCH value over 0.5 or something to that effect. I wouldn't be always showing 5 results if the last few results are a completely different topic. It would take some experimenting to get the results I wanted. I am tempted to try matching against the actual contents of the posting too, but this seems to do the trick for now.

You can read about MATCH and AGAINST on the FullText Search Functions page on the MySQL website.

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Category: Blogging

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