How to add a popular posts section in WordPress

By richardbaxterseo | Published October 11, 2008

One of the new features on my blog is a popular posts section in the sidebar. It’s now very easy to do this yourself. Here’s how:

1) Download and install the “Post Plugin Library” from here and activate it. This plugin does nothing by itself but supplies common code for the Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins.

2) Now download and install the “Popular Posts” plugin from here. Activate the plugin too.

You’ll now have a “Popular Posts” option in your settings menu. The options are pretty clear – here’s a screenshot of the admin screen:

When you’re ready to insert the list of posts into your site, use this tag:

<?php popular_posts(); ?>

This is a really nice way to help internal linking in your site and a great way to make sure that your older, but more popular posts continue to recieve plenty of internal link love to keep them ranking in the search engines, and Rob Marsh’s plugin does it very nicely.

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