Imagine yourself as a new visitor to a website.  A couple of your friends have talked about it and you decided to check this one out.  You head to the home page and find a few posts that look interesting.  Enjoying those posts, you jump into the archive to find more.  Overall, the website has great information but about 75% of the content is about subjects that don’t interest you.  After looking at 15 of the over 100 pages of archives and only finding a few posts you are interested about, you get a call and close out the browser.  If only you had some way to identify other posts related to the ones you liked.

Keeping readers attention and interest can be difficult at times.  You can be the best writer on the web, but if the subjects you are writing about don’t interest the reader at that time, you will lose him or her.  To help keep the readers interest, writers will often link back to previous posts within the context of a new post when appropriate.  That works great if you can fit in those links but sometimes, you just can’t.  In those times, you need some way to identify posts that are similar to the one you are writing.  You need YARPP. [Read more…]