Website owners and strategists can boost their website’s traffic by taking advantage of internal tactics. These include optimizing content for search engines, creating a user-friendly navigation system, and regularly updating content. By utilizing these techniques, website owners can increase the number of visitors to their site.

Increasing page views from within your site is an inexpensive way to boost traffic. To do this, use social toolbars to encourage visitors to explore more pages on your website.

Adding related links to a website can help keep visitors engaged and on the page longer. WordPress users can easily add these links with plugins or without them.

Third-party linking services are becoming increasingly popular, with many emerging to offer similar services to non-Wordpress sites. We explore three of the most popular in this post.

A full list of items is available below.

Outbrain

Outbrain’s widget offers customizable options to increase page views, including displaying links from within or external websites, as well as thumbnails and text. It also features an assessment feature allowing visitors to rate items on a 5-star scale or “inch up” an article.

High-traffic websites with quality content can tap into an additional revenue stream by partnering with Outbrain, a platform used by major media outlets such as Slate, Huffington Post, ELLE and TMZ to distribute their content.

Discover how Outbrain for Publishers can help you reach your audience with a click of a button.

Benefits:

Outbrain helps websites with over 500,000 monthly page views in the US engage visitors by listing related posts. It also offers a paid distribution program, making it an attractive option for those looking to maximize their reach.

Outbrain’s CSS guide enables you to customize the appearance of your related content widget to match your website’s design. If you need assistance, their forum and mobile website support are available.

Cons:

Signing up for Outbrain, a content recommendation platform, can be tricky. The “claim key” process may require assistance from an employee and users have no control over the size of thumbnails.

nRelate

nRelate’s Related Content feature offers an easier way to customize related links from your blog or blogroll than Outbrain, allowing you to control which links are displayed.

NRelate’s design is tailored to fit the background of any website, and supports 13 major languages, making it an ideal solution for non-English blogs. It promises a traffic boost of up to 12%, making it an attractive option for bloggers.

Benefits:

Users can customize their widget experience with nRelate, adjusting text and thumbnail size through the control panel.

nRelate offers a way to revive old content, giving it the same attention as newer posts. Through its revenue sharing program, publishers and subscribers can benefit from this feature by selecting how far back archived posts should be recommended.

Cons:

nRelate’s 12,500 publishers pale in comparison to Outbrain’s 70,000, so don’t expect a huge boost in traffic and revenue. Plus, it takes two hours or more for nRelate to index your website after installation - meaning recommended links won’t appear until then.

LinkWithin is a fresh addition to the market, providing services similar to nRelate and Outbrain. For now, it only displays related links from within the website, but more features are expected in the future.

This product is designed to make life simpler: no sign-up required, and setup is a breeze. It’s ready to use right away.

Benefits:

LinkWithin is a lightweight, fast-loading platform that intelligently handles non-video content. Instead of displaying an empty box or error image, it shows text with links when no thumbnail is detected. Its simple design makes it suitable for most layouts.

LinkWithin does not offer a way to monetize related links, but this could be beneficial as visitors are less likely to be distracted by ads and leave the site.

Cons:

LinkWithin does not offer the same level of analytics as Outbrain, making it difficult for users to track visits and article popularity. Additionally, customizing the appearance of widgets requires editing theme files, which can be a challenge for some. Lastly, there is no way to remove recommended links that may not be suitable for a website.

In a nutshell

A comparison of services is presented in a table to help users make an informed decision.

Outbrain, RelateLink, and User Control offer varying levels of complexity and revenue sharing, with mobile support, staff responsiveness, and network site support varying between the three. Outbrain and RelateLink both offer analysis capabilities.

WordPress plugins

Want to improve your WordPress site with better plugins? Look no further: these are some of the top picks for displaying related content and links.

Microkid’s Related Posts Slider and Thumbnail plugins allow WordPress users to easily display related posts on their websites. Contextuele Related Posts is another plugin that provides a similar service.

Faq

Final note

This guide provides readers with the best third-party “related links” widgets for their blog. If you have any questions, please reach out to us. Don’t forget to share this article with your friends and show your support!

Have questions about the best third-party “related links” widgets for your blog? Need to correct any misinformation? Want to add an alternate method? Reach out to us via our contact page, social media accounts, or Telegram channel. We’re here to help and answer your questions within 24-48 hours (weekends excluded).