Hello friends,

Having related posts on display is very important. This reduces the bounce rate of your website and also increases the visitor engagement with your content. But this has already been discussed here in The CMS Place.

In this post I will continue this topic with some of the popular methods for displaying related posts but this time inside your content. This will allow you to drastically increase your pageviews and thus improve your SEO even more.

Method 1: The good-old manual link creation

In order to do this you need to make a list of all posts that might be related to the current one and then create internal dofollow links to them.

Make sure that you pick the most important posts and also choose a suitable text style. For example you might bold the “Read more” text and make the title of the related post italic. That’s it!

Method 2: Use shortcodes that colorize a text block and then apply Method 1

For example for the Graphene WordPress theme there is a stand-alone plugin that generates shortcodes that achieve this effect. So you can try this method and create something that stands for call-to-action. The following can also be achieved by using custom CSS but this is not recommended for beginners.

Method 3: Use a pagebuilder plugin and add Call-to-actions for the related posts

For example SiteOrigin’s beautiful and extremely easy to use Pagebuilder can help you do this. Simply add several rows or use only one row and the Layout Builder widget.

The idea is quite simple –  divide your text into several Visual Editor (or similar) widgets. Then in the rows between add Call-to-action widgets and set them to link to the related content. You can adjust background color, button with icon, button effect, button color and text. It is easy enough and efficient so if you need to act manually you can try this out.

Another option is to use the Contextual Related Posts widget inside the Pagbuilder’s rows. You can also use the shortcode for this plugin to achieve the effect even without using any pagebuilder.

You can also add images that will serve as links for the related posts. A good idea is to use their featured images and probably some text. The SiteOrigin Pagebuilder has different widgets that can help you do this with ease. In the worst case scenario you can insert another Visual Editor widget for each widget and a text wiget above it that will serve as a Call-to-Action text. Well it’s not that bad actually, don’t you think so?

Method 4: Use the Inline Related Posts plugin.

This is probobaly the easiest way to display related posts inside your content. Simply install and activate the plugin and then adjust its settings. Go to Settings -> Inline Related Posts inside your WordPress dashboard.

Then on the Settings tab you can:

• Set the plugin as Active or Inactive;
• Set the Call-to-action text;
• Choose a theme from the dropdown menu (some of the themes are only available for the premium version of the plugin);
• Set the initial Opacity;
• Set the CSS margin-top;
• Set the CSS margin-bottom;
• Choose the color of the Call-to-action text;
• Set the post title color;
• Do the same for the box background color;
• Choose the hover effect for all of this (on mouse-over);
• Choose where to insert the inline related posts;
• Set the number of boxes per post;
• Set the words interval between each box – for example display one related post after 250 words;
• You can choose to insert a box at the end of the article if needed – probably you will disable this if you use another plugin for this purpose (for example Contextual Related Posts);
• Set the Engine settings – i.e. how the plugin should select the related posts. Here you can set this to happen based on the tags, categories or both categories and tags;
• Set the robots settings for the internal links – dofollow or nofollow links;
• Select to open links in a new tab – i.e. the target attribute for the links;
• Set the metabox integration for enabling/disabling the plugin for pages or for posts only;

The premium version of the plugin provides additional options:

• Configure UNLIMITED boxes;
• Premium themes that can display the featured image as well;
• More hover effects and colors;
• Extremely useful 24/7 support;
• Problem Solving within 48 hours;
• 100 seconds Install & Forget procedure;

Here is the settings panel of the plugin:

As you will notice it provides you with a live preview so that you can see what will happen to the inline related posts boxes when you change the settings.

Here is a video that presents the plugin’s functionality:

So this is it friends! Which of these methods is your favourite? Share your thoughts in the comment section below and do not forget to spread the word in social media.

See you soon!