I have been doing some experiments lately to gain organic traffic to some of my websites by creating pages with internal search results and letting them get indexed via forum signatures. And so far it did increase my organic traffic a bit.
I wrote about this a while back on my own blog and thought to contribute the post to the SEOmoz community as it helped me already very much. (and please, my native language is not English and this is my first post on YOUmoz, so be kind. :P)
So here is what we need:
- A list with keywords you want to be found for
- A pimped search results page
- A list of internal search results
Putting up a nice list of keywords you want to be found for might not be as hard as you think. This article can help you a lot with finding the right keywords for your website.
You have to pimp up the search results page of your website a bit since it doesn’t have the right parameters in it. For Wordpress users, read this article from Joost:
Although I have tweaked it a bit more to make the search results appear between H1 tags.
Open the file in your template folder called search.php and search in it for: Search results.
In the default Wordpress template, you will find this:
Search Results
Change this into:
You searched for:
On the same page, you will also find:
No posts found. Try a different search?
Replace this with:
No search results found for:
Try a different search?
It is also possible that you may need to add the following code into your search.php, if it isn’t already in the code:
That line of code will put an excerpt of your articles in the search results, if, of course there is/are a relevant article(s) available on your blog/website.
A few plugins we’re also going to need are:
- Search Everything – with this plugin you can search through every page, tags, category, comment, password protected pages, drafts, excerpts, you name it; it’s all in the configuration and you decide it all.
- Advanced Excerpt – with this plugin you can play with the layout of your article excerpts. Visit the author’s website to read about its full functionality.
Now after pimping the search results page, we need to get our search results list indexed. A list like this would look like:
domain/?s=keyword1
domain/?s=keyword2
domain/?s=keyword3
etc
Please try to keep your list short. For indexing, try to spread it in different forums so it looks a bit more natural 😉
As result, you’re going to get visitors to your website who found your website via organic search results.
See example below:
Please try to keep the SERPs clean, and make sure you do have something to offer to your visitors when they find your search results page in the SERPs. Use only keywords that are relevant to your website.
I hope you guys enjoyed this article and that it helps someone in gaining more organic traffic.
