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How will you go about improving the reader’s engagement on your blog so that they spend more time, keep coming back and at the same time helping your blog with its SEO?

If you are blogging for making money online or for building online business, then looking at ways to improve reader’s engagement will be a valuable investment. You will never want people coming and leaving without spending any time on your blog.

You would love to convert each reader into your fan and customer if you are selling any sort of service or product through your blog. Below I’m sharing my favorite engagement plugins for WordPress users.

Related Post Plugin

By including related posts in your blog posts and RSS feeds, you are giving your blog readers more targeted and interesting stories they may be interested in reading. You can show related posts on your blog through Yet another Related Post Plugin(YARPP) or Nrelate plugin. YARPP is a very popular related post plugin for WordPress blogs and is currently used by Matt Cutts on his official blog. Nrelate will help you show thumbnails with regular text in related post section.

Top Commentator’s Widget

By including a top commenter’s widget on your blog sidebar, you are actually motivating your blog readers to leave more comments on your blog. There will be some of your blog readers who will be interested in getting to the top of commenter’s list so that they get a chance to showcase their brand in your blog sidebar. You can use the Top Commentators widget plugin to show the list of top commenter’s in your blog sidebar.

Digg Digg Plugin

How about adding a floating share bar in your blog posts? You can do so by using the Digg Digg plugin which will help you add a social sharing buttons for major social media websites in your blog posts with their live voting counter. Floating social media bars with votes count looks really cool and will motivate your blog readers share stories of their choice on social websites website’s where they are active. These days social media signals looks be the most crucial factor when it comes about getting high rankings on Google search engine. More shares on these networks means more targeted traffic to your blog from these websites and from Google search.

CommentLuv Plugin

You can increase visitors engagement further by making comments section as dofollow. This way all of commenters on your blog will be getting a dofollow backlink in exchange for every comment they leave on your blog. From your part, you should make sure you are just approving quality comments only. You can make comments section as dofollow on your WordPress blog with the help of CommentLuv plugin. This plugin comes with lots of other useful features.

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links plugin is basically used for interlinking of your blog contents with the intention to help them rank high on major search engines. If we are interlinking our blog contents in a natural ways and are doing so for giving additional value to our blog readers then it should help them navigate to different parts of your blog with the help of links that you are adding on your blog with the help of this SEO plugin.

Wibiya Toolbar

Wibiya toolbar plugin will allow you adding lots of interactive features to your WordPress blog. You can use their toolbar to add Facebook Connect and Twitter alerts on your blog. After installation, Wibiya Toolbar will appear at the footer of your blogs.

WP-PageNavi Plugin

WP-PageNavi plugin will add a professional paging navigation to your blog. Availability of advanced pagination navigation will help your readers browse through the old blog posts from your blog. There can be certain categories on your blog, some of your blog readers might be really interested in. Presence of a proper pager will help them with easy navigationof different stories that are available in categories, archives, tags and on home page sections etc.

Contact Form

You should add a contact form on your blog. It’s going to be really frustrating if your blog readers are finding no way to contact you. You should add it in your navigation menu so that it is easy accessible to all of your blog readers. If you have a high traffic blog, you can keep a captcha along with a contact form. But keep the captcha part very simple because your actual blog readers will never love to fill in those ugly captcha’s that are difficult to understand even. You can use Contact Form 7 plugin to add a contact form on your blog.

Subscribe to Comments

You can further improve engagement number for your blog by allowing your readers the facility to subscribe to comments on blog posts of their interest. You can use Subscribe to Comments plugin to allow your blog commenter’s the facility to get notification about new comments coming on blog posts where they have just left a comment. This plugin will motivate your blog readers to come back on your blog to check latest comments, replies to their own comments and for making extra comments.

Twitter @Anywhere Plus Plugin

Twitter @Anywhere Plus plugin will allow you add twitter @Anywhere on your blog. You can use this plugin to show a fully customizable twitter box at the end of your blog posts. You can enter your own custom message or can use post title, URL and your twitter ID in @Anywhere Twitter box. You should start seeing more tweets against your stories after using this engagement improving plugin.

Are you using any of these plugins on your WordPress blog? Are you finding any of these plugins really helping you improve your blog engagement metrics, share your thoughts and concerns in the comments section?