The first reason is more or less common sense.  Someone searches for “how to do X and Y” and I have a page indexed that is “how to do X.”  Now somewhere on my site I may have another blog post that answers their question more completely.  Perhaps that page is new and hasn’t been indexed yet.  Or perhaps the SE user didn’t know exactly what they were looking for and after finding my page with their botched or incomplete search terms they find what they were actually looking for in a related post.

The second and most important reason to use the related post is for SEO purposes.  The main purpose is “interlinking.”  If you don’t know, interlinking simply is defined as the internal link structure within your own site.  Now suppose your get a high authority link to a certain page on your site about oranges.  Google now thinks that this page is important and relavant information.  Perhaps your post about oranges mentions fruit a good bit.  Now your related posts display other fruit related posts, like posts on grapefruit and apples.  With the related posts plugin you are actually pushing your own link juice so that now google sees that your other pages are relavant and important also.

Also another thing to consider is your indexing saturation.  This can be figured out by dividing the number of pages you have indexed in google by the number or pages that are on your site.  If you don’t know how to figure out the number of pages has index then read:

Know about your site and your competition – Google Operators

The related post plugin helps drastically with index saturation by pushing google to some of your older posts that happen to be relevant.  This is particularly useful if you have a large number of posts(1000+).  Now their are several related post plugins out their, and sadly I haven’t tried many of them.  The one I use is here:

WordPress Recent Post Plugin

Free Blogs

Free Blogs are a great way to build some high quality links for your site.  I’ve stated in previous posts the huge advantage a person has by owning several websites.  This tactic evens the playing field a little bit, and allows you to do the same thing by taking advantage of free blog providers online.  First I should state that starting a free blog for the purposes of link building or SEO is often against the hosting sites rules and I do not condone this action(be careful and be discrete).

This method can be very effective given the high PR of most free blog sites.  PR is Google’s measuring stick, telling you how valuable the particular site is perceived to be by Google.  These links are high quality because they come from trusted sites.

Now, if you simply go spamming the free blogs you are just going to get your free blog banned, so lets use some class in doing this.  One thing that I like to do is write a generic blog post in word, then spin the article a little (spin – keep same content and present it in slightly different language) for each free blog site that I plan on posting it on.  This means I write 1 article and alter it slightly for each blog so they all appear unique to the SE’s.  When possible you always want to use ANCHOR text for a link, meaning that the hyperlinks should be inside of the article attached to keywords that you are trying to rank for.  Use your imagination and come up with a similar game plan.  You may even want to put 1 link to your site, and 1 link to another ‘free blog’ that you posted on for quick indexing.

I’m not going to give you a list of free blogs to use because they are increadibly easy to find.  Type “free blog” into google, and that should keep you busy for a while.  I would obviously start w/ Wordpress and Blogger and then move on down the line.  A good percentage of the blogs use WP or a similar platform, so you should be right at home.

So our objective is to get all of the comments that we have made noticed by google bot so we can pick up our sweet links.  If you simply post a comment, then there is a reasonable chance that search engines will never pick it up.  The solution is to gently guide the search engines to check out those links.  I’m going to give you a quick easy way to do this.  Please, be creative and try different ways to make this work for you.

1. First thing to do is to make a list of all of the pages that you made a comment on.  If you make a comment, and it goes through, save the link in a notepad document.

2. Now sign up for an account at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start a blog.  Now write a post that includes links to all of the comment pages that you saved.

3. Now sign up for an account at digg.com.  Now submit your wordpress or blogger post that has the links to digg.

That is all there is to it.  If all goes well your digg page will be indexed quickly.  It will spit google bot out at your free blog, and your blog will spit google out to all of the links that have your comments on them.  Now I’m not saying that this is a fool proof method or 100% successful.  This method can however be applied in a number of different ways boosting its effectivness.

Note:  Don’t use your own blog to post links to the comments you made.  You’ll be turning your 1 way links into recipricol links and screwing up the link weight.

For this technique you need an existing site, hopefully a blog to use (some of this will work without an existing site – keep reading).  It is really not that difficult, but I classify it as an intermediate technique because you have to already have a site.

An existing blog works perfect for this because the front page is constantly changing, and constantly getting crawled by search engines.  To make this work, in step 3 in the last post you compile a list of 5-10 blogs that you can comment on.   Now what you want to do is save all of the urls from the pages that you commented on.  You can also click on the comments page and get that seperate url.  If you want to be really sneaky, grab the RSS feeds from the comments and save urls from those.

If you have a blog and you don’t care about a shameless out of place post, then write a post that has hyperlinks to all the pages (not the feeds)  that you want indexed, and add your new site to the blog roll.  If you have a respectible site, then add your site to the the blog roll, and add the links discretely to the blog roll also.  The idea is to get the pages that you want indexed and followed on the front page of your blog.  Keep the link to your new site in the blogroll so it stays on your page for a while.  Delete the links to the comment pages off your blog roll, or delete the post that you put them in after a week.

You can do this part without an existing blog.  Do this at your own risk…

Now what to do with those RSS feeds?  I don’t think anyone would mind if you used a ping service on the feed.  I don’t want you to abuse any one service, so just search for “blog ping” and use something that comes up.  Don’t go abusing the servers because you can get your ip banned for exessive use.  Send 5 out over 5 different servers, wait 20 mins and send the last 5 out and you should be fine.