Showing related links on your blog boosts SEO by giving new life to old blog posts so that they're not forgotten by search engines.

While it’s a blogging best practice to offer additional value to your readers by linking to related articles within the copy of your posts, you can take this a step further by installing a simple plug-in that will automatically display a list of blog posts related to the current post.

For example, a recent post on corporate and life mastery coach Niels Johnson-Lameijer on our blog will display previous posts about other WMT Positive Role Models! This has great benefits for your site both in terms of usability and search engine marketing.

Integrating Related Posts into Your Blog

Currently, we are using the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin for WordPress on our blog to integrate the related links you see below our posts. The plugin is customizable and allows you to set a threshold on the relevancy of the posts that you want to show and uses algorithms for finding related posts that also takes into consideration categories and tags. (Thanks to Kate McMillan, our Web Design Wonkette, for that great plugin recommendation!)

Usability Benefits of Displaying Related Posts

Showing related posts on your blog gives visitors an easy way to navigate through content that may interest them. This is a great way to keep readers engaged in your blog while boosting your pageviews!

Related Posts for Boosting Pageviews and SEO

Calling upon previous blog posts from your archives related to your current blog post is also good for search engine marketing because it increases the the amount of internal linking (relevant pages within your site point back to one another).

It gives some of your older posts a new life and makes them look more popular and important to Google and other search engines. This is especially important if you have a lot of content on your blog. With hundreds of pages of relevant content on your site, using a related posts plug-in is an easy way to link relevant pages to one another so they are not forgotten by the search engines!

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Eliminating Spam comments and pingbacks from your site is good for SEO.

To me Spam is like obscenity: I know it when I see it.

And lately, as a blogger I’ve been seeing a deluge of Spam pingbacks in my moderation queue. You’ve probably seen them too. These are comments you receive from other sites that point back to your post with references to “see original post,” “read the rest here,” or “view the post.”

So what to do – approve or not approve? They seem harmless and you want people to comment on your blog. And all these are third party links back to your site so it’s all good, right?

WRONG! Spam pingbacks are harmful to your site’s SEO!

Welcome to the world of pingback spam. Sure, these comments aren’t incredibly constructive or insightful but the worst part about them is that they seem innocuous on the surface. However, publishing them to your blog could be harmful to your search engine marketing.

Pingback spam may not be as obvious and offensive as the spam that we’re used to seeing (like the hundreds of spam emails you’ve received over your lifetime from Cialis or Pedi Paws), however, they need to be blocked just the same.

So thanks to Akismet for this great primer: Eliminating SPAM is good SEO.

Akismet provides 3 reasons why your should NOT publish SPAM comments:

1. You are undermining your site’s SEO and diluting your “Google juice”

The spammer’s web site employs black-hat SEO tactics and spam methods to build backlinks from anywhere he can find them, including some of the web’s worst neighborhoods. By regularly publishing links to spammers’ web sites, you’re giving Google and other search engines a hint that links from your blog are poor quality. Additionally, by helping to validate a spam site, you are also inadvertently weakening the value of each of the other links from your blog.

2. You are attracting more spammers.

Spammers deliberately seek out blogs that other spammers have successfully spammed, because they know they are easy targets where future spam is more likely to be approved. Additionally, some blog applications like WordPress will automatically approve comments from regular users who have had at least one comment approved, automatically skipping the moderation process. Spammers know this and will often link to a harmless looking site in their first comment (or include no link at all), but link to progressively more blatant spam in subsequent comments.

3. You are damaging your site’s reputation.

You might not click on the links in all the comments on your blog, but some of your readers will. And some of those links will go to sites that are sleazy, offensive, or harmful. If you do publish spam comments on your blog, you might discover later that thousands of other blogs and forums have been spammed with links to your blog.

For more great SEO tips and healthy marketing advice, follow me on Twitter @my_dog_ate_it