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Plugin Description
The widget aim is trying to reduce the bounce rate of your blog and provide the visitor a better navigation experience.
When a visitor lands on your site from a search engine result page, he is in need of a certain information / service your page might satisfy. It often happens the visitor go away just after reading that page, for various reasons. Why not to try suggesting him more posts on the topic he is interested in at that moment, so that he might visit more pages?
The Search Engine Query in WordPress widget grabs the query the visitor used on the search engine, executes it in the blog search and displays results, suggesting the visitor further reading about what he is actually looking for.
If the visitor does not come from a search engine and the current page is the single post template, the widget can display the most recent posts in the current post category. There is an option in the widget control panel to turn this feature down. In that case, if the user does not come from the search engine the widget box simply doesn’t appear.
The widget is compatible with WP Super Cache, just enable the ajax technology on the widget settings.
The plugin has been tested only on WordPress 2.7 but should not cause errors on previous versions (it might not work indeed).
The plugin requires Php5 or higher.
Widget Features
* If the visitor comes from a search engine result page, the widget grabs the search engine query, executes it in the internal search (with the WP_Query object) and shows results
* If the visitor is browsing a post detail (is_single()) and the visit source was not a search engine result page, the widget get the current post category and shows the most recent posts in that category
* If the “Track clicks” option is enabled in the widget control panel, the plugin adds campaign dimension tags to links in the widget box.
If your web analytics tool supports them, you’ll find a “Search engine query in WP widget” campaign that will allow you to understand how many clicks where produced by the widget box and if they were made from the category search or the search engine query search
* The widget layout can be customized by editing the seq_in_wp.css css file located in the plugin directory
* The widget can execute the search as the main page loads, or after the page has loaded with Ajax technology. If you choose the ajax search, the widget becomes compatible with WP Super Cache plugin
The widget contrtrol panel lets you choose:
1. The widget box title
2. The number of related posts to display
3. To search by category if the search engine query is not available
4. To track clicks with campaign link tags
5. To use standard mode or Ajax mode
6. To receive log emails when a user lands on the blog and the widget appear (to be used carefully)
List of supported search engines (international and any local version):
Google, Yahoo!, Msn, Ask, Live Search, Lycos, Aol, Dmoz, Altavista, Gigablast, AllTheWeb, HotBot
Please report any bug (or enhancements requests) on the plugin main page: Search engine query in WordPress. I can’t monitor the Internet to know if something doesn’t work on a certain environment 🙂
Available languages
English, Italian, French by Jerome Rigaud, Dutch by Bas Bruinekool.
Send me (fcastaldo[at]gmail.com) the .mo file in your language and I’ll add it to the project (with credit of course)!
Arbitrary section
More information: http://www.francesco-castaldo.com/plugins-and-widgets/search-engine-query-in-wordpress/
Screenshots
The widget suggesting more posts depending on the query executed by the search engine that brought to the post
The widget suggesting more posts in the same category of the current one
The widget control panel
Google Analytics view of the widget campaign (note the bouce rate under site avarage). By choosing “Dimension: Source” you can see how many links have been clicked by the “category” results or the “search engine query” results. By choosing “Dimension: Keywords” you can see categories or search phrases clicked. Stats refer to a brand new sites with a few visits.
