New Contender For Best WordPress Plugin: Landing Pages

June 15th, 2006 • Related • Filed Under

Sometimes I think there are far too many WordPress plugins to cope with and that some of them have no real practical use, but I’ve just discovered a true gem in Landing Sites, which improves the chances that visitors from search engines will find what they want on your blog and will also read more than just one page.

Anyone who runs a blog will tell you that 90% of all traffic comes from search engines, where people are looking for something specific and if they can’t see what they want on the resulting page will usually leave.

The Landing Sites plugin tries to solve this problem by automatically showing related posts from your blog for the original search term.

It works in a similar fashion to my previous favourite plugin Related Posts, but rather than trying to find related posts based on the text within the original post, Landing Posts finds related posts based on the search term entered. In fact, Landing Sites actually uses the Related Posts code and won’t work unless it is installed as well.

To see the plugin in action on my pages try searching on Google for one of the examples given below and click on the link to my site:

You’ll notice that I’ve added at the top of a page a new section that is only visible if a visitor goes direct to an article via a search engine, which shows other posts on my blog that could match the same search term.

I’ve also added a similar section just above the existing ‘Other Related’ which shows the same items again to save users having to scroll to the top of the page. Although these results look very similar to the Related Post matches, they are subtlety different and worth showing in my view.

If you want to give the Landing Posts plugin a run out then click here to download the plugin or click here to learn a bit more about how it works.

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About the Author

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Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

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There Are 10 Responses So Far. »

  1. #1

    Comment by Johnny Thawte on 7 November 2006:

    This is a great idea… I’m definitely going to try this out.

  2. #2

    Comment by Johnny Thawte on 7 November 2006:

    fyi,

    This landing sites plugin doesn’t seem to work right with WP-Cache. Sad, cause that’s my one standard plugin I always use.

  3. #3

    Comment by Everton Blair on 7 November 2006:

    What problems are you having? I just doublechecked as I’ve only just installed WP-cache2 and it’s working find on my site.

  4. #4

    Comment by Saul on 12 December 2006:

    What I want to do on my blog, is every few hours take the oldest post and move it to the
    front of the queue, all automatically. Anyone know if there is a plugin that can do this or
    a simple way to set up another plugin to do this (use my own feed perhaps)?
    Thanks.

  5. #5

    Comment by Everton Blair on 12 December 2006:

    I’m not sure why you’d want to do this, but if you’re trying to draw attention to old posts there are plugins that will display random posts or you could try the readers post plugin

  6. #6

    Comment by Raj on 1 January 2007:

    The problem with Landing Sites + Wp-Cache2 is that it caches the page with landing sites results on it. From there on and till cache expires, the page will show the old landing sites results no matter where you came from.

    Example: For the first time, if I came to your site from google using some keyword, Wp-Cahe caches it. Second time, if I come to your site from msn, the page tells that I came from Google looking for ‘old keywords’.

    Btw, your comments form is little annoying with the words preview as I type. It makes typing such slow.. :(

  7. #7

    Comment by Raj on 1 January 2007:

    When I click submit comment, I see the following on next page.

    Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /home/connecte/public_html/wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_second_chance.php:2) in /home/connecte/public_html/wp-content/plugins/alinks/alinks.php on line 23

  8. #8

    Comment by Everton on 2 January 2007:

    yeah I’m turning Live comment preview as it’s a bit pointless when I think about it

  9. #9

    Comment by Tomek on 23 July 2007:

    Working just fine! thx!

  10. #10

    Comment by Voucher Codes on 24 July 2008:

    I am not sure whats wrong happened with you guys.. But it worked fine with me.. Thank you very much Everton..

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