One of the most important features that is almost a must have for every blog is the Related Posts feature/plugin. Why is it necessary you may wonder. I tell you, when I say its a must have, its really a must have.

It makes your blog a lot more user friendly. When a visitor is looking for a particular topic, he/she gets a nice list of other posts related to the topic. This way your visitors spend more time on your blog, and that's what you want, right?

Another reason for adding Related Posts widget is Search Engine Optimization. Related Posts in a way means lots of internal linking within the site, which makes the search engine crawlers crawl more number of pages, hence helping your blog's SEO.

But one huge problem is that most bloggers are not good with codes. So its not so easy for them to edit the HTML and add the appropriate codes for Related posts list to work. So in this article, I'm going to list few very nice Related Posts plugins that will take hardly few minutes to install, and no coding knowledge is required at all.

There are quite a few Related Post plugins, but I will list only a few, that are popular and stable.

1. LinkWithin: It appears at the botton of each post in the form of thumbnails.


Pros: It is free, supports thumbnails, no registration is required to use this plugin.
Cons: Adds a LinkWithin credit below the thumbnails.


2. Outbrain: It looks similar to LinkWithin, and comes with an optional Post Rating feature.



Pros: It is free, supports both text and thumbnails, no registration is required to use this plugin. Moreover the added Post Rating system supports both star ratings and thumb recommendations.
Cons: Couldn't find any.

But all these third party plugins have a common issue, they can make your blog load slow, the reason being the fact that they use their own servers and all scripts are installed there, not in our blogger blog.