Some Tweaking of the Blog

There have been a couple of minor changes made to our humble abode over the last couple of days. I’m always toying around with this thing trying to make it better.

I came across a combination of plugins that do a pretty neat thing.

When people use search engines and find the blog, often they don’t land on exactly what they are looking for. A good example of this would be a Google search for “Phoenix real estate stats”. This search currently returns an entry in the number 7 position of page 1. Not a bad result, but the problem is, if the search result is clicked on, the searcher is sent to the blog home page, which may or may not have a post currently displayed that pertains to Phoenix real estate stats.  Mr. Visitor likely quickly scans the page, and if they don’t see what they are looking for they are apt to leave — maybe to never return, which makes me sad.

Enter The Landing Sites plugin. This slick little gizmo will display a list of posts related to their specific search in a prominent place. And it will only display this list if the visitor is coming from a search engine referral. Visitors coming from a bookmark, clicking through from another blog’s link, or directly from entering a URL won’t see these results.

Here’s a screen shot showing the results from the above mentioned search referral:

Here is a close up of the Landing Sites results:

In theory, this plugin could result in visitors from search engines being able to quickly find posts that are more “dialed in” with what they are searching for — which is always a good thing to provide your visitors.

Landing Sites works in conjunction with the Related Entries plugin, which I’ve seen on many blogs but never been able to get properly implemented here until I tore into some theme specific PHP files. It’s functioning now and you will now see a list of potentially related posts linked at the bottom of every blog post.

Another addition is the list of monthly top commentators in the right side-bar. I had a similar plugin installed at one point but it counted pingback spam links as comments. The Show Top Commentators plugin seems to fix that nasty problem.

Here’s a shot of what this plugin looks like in action:

This plugin was installed to share a little link love with frequent commentators. It resets monthly (the time period is completely configurable).

And speaking of the pingback spams, I deactivated Spam Karma 2 and reactivated Askimet as the primary spam filter of Phoenix Real Estate Guy. Time will tell if Askimet better handles ping/trackback spam. In just over 18 months, Spam Karma blocked over 350,000 comment spams (how ridiculous is that?). It’s a great plugin, but the pingback spam was getting beyond tiresome. If Askimet doesn’t help, the next step is to install the version of SK that includes Askimet. We’re also running Bad Behavior as another weapon in the ongoing war against comment/ping spam.

As always, if you see anything acting goofy due to these changes, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress plugins, Landing Sites, pingback spam sucks

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