Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in Wordpress: I have been a huge fan of related posts in blogs for some time. They really help your readers by drawing them into the conversation and increase stickiness of your blog. WordPress.com has a similar feature with related posts from various other blog on the network. Variations of the related posts plugins include our very own “Where did they go from here?” plugin and more centralized version such as the Waypath service.

The tutorial linked above explains one way to add thumbnails to your related post links in order to draw your readers attention to the links. The method is not as automated as I would like it to be and does require a few bits of code that is provided but I believe it can really help keep readers on your blog longer. I remember when small pictures were added next to AdSense ads and it raised clickthroughs to such an extent that Google had to re-examine their policy and ended up making them illegal. My suggestion is to keep the thumbnail small and relevant. Automated generation of thumbnails would be much more preferred. As part of the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition 2009, George Spyros has also released his Rich Related Posts plugin that might be of interest.