Best Wordpress Engagement Plugins: Make Users Read More Posts

5. Landing Sites

The Landing Sites plugin is one my personal favourites. When a visitor visits your site from a search engine (about 60% of my traffic) they were probably searching for something very specific. Although the article they clicked on looked like a good match on the search engine, when they clickthrough and read the article they might end up disappointed.

What the Landing Sites plugin does is to try and stop them going, by running a search on the exact same keywords and presenting other related posts that are relevant. A slightly different set of results is presented than for the Related Posts Plugin, which returns similar articles based on the keywords within the post currently displayed, rather than the user’s own search terms. To see the plugin in action click here or click on the image on the right.

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6. Subscribe To Comments

Again, I’m surprised how few blogs include the Subscribe To Comments plugin. I hate it when I have to waste time going back to some blogs to see if anyone has left a new comment. This plugin makes it easy for users to get email updates, pulling them back to the blog and driving Engagement, when a new comment is posted on particular posts. A very nice interface is available for users to manage their own subscriptions

I hope someday that they make this part of the default Wordpress build.

More: Subscribe To Comments

7. Sociable

This plugin has a great interface and adds to the bottom of all posts icons for all the top bookmarking sites, so that users can quickly add posts to their favourite bookmarking sites. Site owners have full control over how many and which icons are displayed.

There are also many other variants on this theme, but I think that Sociable is the best.

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8. Ultimate Tag Warrior

What better way to drive Engagement by showing new users what you write the most about? Tagging your posts can also help search engine visitors quickly find other related posts.

Despite having the most unassuming landing page, the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin is definitely the most complete Wordpress plugin, offering not only simple implementation if that’s all you want, but a vast range of options it you want to experiment. So far, I’ve implemented a TagCloud showing my top tags and each post shows it’s main tags. Very shortly I’ll be adding the cool Tag Search feature.

More: Ultimate Tag Warrior

9. Recent Comments Widget/Plugin

There are many Recent Comments plugins that all basically all do the same thing, but this one is the only one that goes just that little bit further. Rather than just showing an unsorted chronological list of the most recent comments, the comments are grouped by post and a short excerpt of the comment can also be displayed. Full control is available over the number of comments to show, the size of the excerpt, the max comments to show per post and the max letters per word.

More: Recent Comments Widget

10. Subscribe To Feed Via Email

Although this isn’t actually a plugin, adding a facility for users to subscribe to your RSS feed for updates can help to drive Engagement. My email subscription box has proven to be very popular and approximately 25% of my feed users signed up this way. If you haven’t done so yet I’d definitely recommend signing up with a service like Feedburner or Feedblitz.

More: Feedburner

I hope that you’ve found this roundup useful. Let me know if you’ve got any star plugins you think I should try or that you want to share with other readers, or any other tips you might have.

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