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