Getting Smart About Related Content

Many Drupal sites contain a world of knowledge featuring numerous posts about all manner of expertise. Knowledge driven sites take many forms; news, blogs, social media, forums, wikis, intranets, customer support, etc. If you have lots of content you have lots of opportunities to engage your customers with a plethora of related content – but only if your site is properly organized. Many visitors these days come to a site because they are interesting in learning about a single topic. They may use a search engine, follow a blog, tweet, forum post or other social referrer. They come, read the one post of interest and leave. One and done. That is unless your posts lead them to other related content where interest might lie. Then we are much more likely to get a visitor to stick, e.g. visit more than one page. We are much more likely to make a memorable brand impression. We are much more likely to generate brand champions and additional referrers.

Where's my content?

One of the concepts that confuse many people new to Drupal is how to find their content. In a new Drupal site when you post new content, most of the time there is no automatic way to get to it. This is because Drupal doesn’t want to assume how you want people to find your content. Drupal instead gives you many different linking methods and it is left up to the site builder to determine which one is appropriate. Common linking methods include:

• Menus - fixed hierarchical link structures
• Views- provides all manner of lists. Typical uses include blog style river of posts pages and last or most popular link lists in sidebar blocks.
• Taxonomy – automatic listing of pages tagged with the same taxonomy terms
• Search – enables users to create lists of pages based on keywords found in content

Despite the Swiss Army Knife of common Drupal linking tools, none really give visitors what they need to solve the one and done syndrome.

Related content linking

What really makes visitors stay are direct links to related content. For this we need to implement some new styles of linking. The two most common ways of doing related content linking is in-content Wikipedia style links and related content sidebar or footer link lists. To see both these styles of links in action see the video at the end of this post. The problem with doing related content links is it can be fairly tedious. For content links, you have to select targeted keyword in your content, find related content then insert the appropriate linking code. For side bar linking the process is similar, extract the main subjects of your post, find related content then embed the links so they can be used as a block or CCK field. Luckily, a new module has been released that not only can help ease the manual linking tasks, it can fully automate both styles of related content links. It even allows you to blend both manual and automated linking. To see how the Link Intelligence module works, check out this video: Photo Credit