Last week I dwelt upon the important factor of blog stickiness. I talked about what it exactly means in plain English and how to improve your overall blog, so it’s more appealing to repeated visitors. This time, like I promised in my previous post, I’ll be covering some Wordpress plugins that, when combined and used properly, can provide some killer results. Let’s have a look shall we:

1. Related Entries. This is possibly one of the best plugins ever made; what this WP plugin effectively does is it creates a series of links pointing to previous related posts, at a user defined location, most commonly at the end of a post after a user finishes reading your content. You can set the number of related posts to display and if you want to display a excerpt (description). Often the generated related posts are pretty much accurate, but here and there you’ll get some really unrelated posts. That’s because the plugin generates related link by comparing the posts URL with other posts, occasionally resulting in inaccurate entries. If you’d want a more advanced and more accurate Related Entries plugin you can use the hacked version by Peter Bowyer, that has messed around with the original code and made it take in consideration tags as well, so it’s a lot more efficient.

2. Subscribe to Comments. This little plugin here, apart from helping you with your repeated visits, it will raise you comment and user interaction as well. What basically does is it gives a commentator the option to subscribe to the respective post’s comments, thus he’ll receive a new e-mail everytime a person comments on that post, with a link to the post as well included. So people are reminded to return and to engage in conversations.

3 . Popularity Contest. This is yet another invaluable plugin for any respecting blogger, that rates in your posts through various variables like number of views, comments, trackbacks etc and gives them a score. You can then rank you posts by week,month, year so you can make some pretty cool retrospective lists and a best of list in your sidebar, that will definitely increase your bounce rate tenfold.

4. Socialize Plugins. When you have a decent amount of traffic and popularity you can expect some users to digg, reddit or stumble your posts, so why not make it easier for them to help you get a shit load of traffic. The following plugins will do just that, by adding story submitting buttons for various social bookmarking websites: Sociable, AddThis, Notable, or as I sometimes prefer to use on some blogs (such as this) the Feed Flare feature from Feedburner; you can find it in your feed settings panel.

5. Visual Sitemap Generator. Remember that your readers are people, and first time readers might get lost when first stepping across your blog, so what you have to do is provide them with a map and there isn’t any better map a website could have then a sitemap. To make things easier the WP Sitemap Generator from Dagon Design has been created. It will make a virtual map of your site with all you posts listed, categorized and order neatly.

6. Archive Plugins. An virtual archive of your blog will stack and display, in a ordinate fashion  your posts, much as a sitemap would do, but with a more advanced functionality and usability. I recommend you use Extended Live Archive or Smart Archives.

7.  In Series. What this plugin does is it lets you write series of posts in WordPress, without having to deal with the hassle of manually writing up tables of contents or “next” and “previous” links in each post. The instruction are fairly simple and can be found on the plugin homepage. I find it to be a really helpful plugin when making long series of posts, helping first time readers to catch up with your content, before moving on.

8. Landing Pages. This is a exceptional plugin, I must say the least. What it does is whenever a users accesses your blog via search engines he will be presented with a series of related posts to his search query. Often search engine traffic is very picky and if the respective users don’t see or get what they won’t in a matter of seconds they’ll most likely start looking elsewhere; why not ease their search?

9. WP-Page Navi. The wordpress default page navigation system is a bit annoyingly slow and tiresome. This plugin will provide a better user experience, as it will allow your readers to browse your content more faster and efficiently. Read more about this here.

If you found this post useful then you might consider stumbling it or bookmarking it to del.icio.us.

The The Top 9 Wordpress Plugins To Help You Make Your Blog Stickier by Tibi Puiu, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.