I’ve been doing more tweaks to the blog to make it more user and search engine friendly. The first upgrade is the Related Post Plugin. This Plugin, available from Mr. Wasabi, will find other blog posts that are related to the current post. This is a good way to generate extra page views and keep readers on your blog. I’m already seeing the effects as a lot of older posts are being read.

The Plugin is extremely easy to install but the instructions are not that great. For one thing it doesn’t tell you where to install that final piece of code to make the Plugin work. I had to fool around with my blog templates until I finally found the desired spot for it.

The Plugin allows you to set how many related posts to display and gives you two ways for displaying them. There are also options to exclude excerpt and password protected pages. The performance of the Related Post Plugin is pretty good. For example in my Making Money with Your Mortgage post, it found these related posts;

• Making Your Mortgage Interest Tax Deductible
• Owning A Home In The US Vs Canada
• Making Money with Your Mortgage - Part 2
• Home Equity Line Of Credit
• Buying Vs Renting

The other Plugin I installed was Optimal Title. This plugin mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the separator to after the title rather than before. This allows you to have your blog name tacked on to the end of the page title instead of having it appear first. In other words, instead of John Chow dot Com >> The Title Of The Blog Post, it will show The Title Of The Blog Post << John Chow dot Com.

Why would you want to do this? Because having your page information appear before your blog name in the title provides more meaningful search engine results. It’s very helpful when the title of your page is very long since most search engine place a limit on the number of charters to display. Having the title go first allows the search engine user to get a better idea on what the page is about. I modified the codes a bit so that the home page displays both my name and the blog description. Before it just displayed my name.

Hopefully the combination of the two new Plugins will send extra Google traffic my way and that extra traffic will view more pages. When it comes to making money on the net, it’s all about traffic.