Plugins to Improve Search?

I set out to see how we could bring WordPress up to par with most search engines - a vain attempt at competing with Google search. The first and most popular solution for “fixing” WordPress search I came upon was Search Reloaded by Semiologic. Certainly Search Reloaded improves the accuracy of the search which is a step in the right direction. But even Semiologic admits it’s not perfect. When using Search Reloaded the results were thinner and more accurate, but sometimes you want more comprehensive and have them sorted accordingly.

Example: Searching for “arthritis” without Search Reloaded returns lots of results, including an article on Osteoarthritis. The same search with Search Reloaded returns only one article title Arthritis.

Ideally, both the Arthritis article AND the Osteoarthritis articles would be returned and sorted accordingly.

Sprucing Up the Search Page

After realizing that I may not be able to do much with the behind the scenes searching I tried tweaking the search page itself to at least give the appearance of a smater search engine. I started with Yoast’s WordPress search tips. Per Joost’s advice I added the Search Excerpt plugin to extract the snippet of text around keywords and bold the keywords in the snippet. I also added his Search Suggest plugin that catches possible typos and suggests the correct spelling (just like Google), and in adition it displays a list of keywords related to the search keyword as suggestions for related searches.

Still Lacking

Despite all of the changes, the search results still lack exactly what we need to achieve: comprehensive, yet accurate results.
Any suggestions for improving WordPress results or are you willing to write a plugin to do so?

This weekend I went to my first WordPress Meetup which was held in PD Johnson’s in Dallas. I wasn’t too sure of what to expect; the summary of the group made it seem like it would be pretty informal. It was. Everyone trickled in, about ten of us, and while some of us ate and others pulled out laptops we chatted mostly about Twitter and WordPress plugins.

Most of my time is spent with people who know little about technology, forget about WordPress and blogging, so hanging out with people who I can actually talk to those things about is refreshing.

However, I know that Dallas has a much larger audience of WordPress fans and major (or at least more than minor) bloggers. I was disappointed that the group doesn’t seem to attract enough of the audience using blogging and social media to its fullest extent. Granted, the group hasn’t been meeting for very long (just since April I think).

What I’d like to see more of is a formal atmosphere where people are encouraged to share with the whole group about how they use WordPress, what benefits it has for them, and how others can improve upon their blogging. One of the reasons I wish for this is because I’ve spent the past three years learning everything I can about WordPress and I’m dying to share the knowledge I’ve gained. It would be neat if the meetups consisted of neatly packaged topics so that the goal is clear and people know why they are coming and what they’re taking away.

On the other hand, maybe the point of these meetups is simply to socialize with other WordPressers and something so formal is outside the lines of what is thought necessary for the group. In that case, I’d love to be part of a new group that encouraged the formal training/learning of WP while the meetup group existed alongside the new group.

Any thoughts?

Check it out: Customize Your Community

I’ll be doing this because I’m building a site for Denton Bible Church that will be used for one of our services. I’ve turned this into a pretty unique theme theme that I’m pretty proud of. About a year ago I built the CollegeLife, the college ministry of Denton Bible Church, site and this new theme will take what I learned from that and build upon it greatly.

Several years ago I created about 10 different HTML/CSS templates (non-WordPress though). I submitted them to 2 or 3 sites and to my surprise they’ve been downloaded probably over 100,000 times now…and they weren’t even that good!

I’ve come a long way now and I can produce much higher quality sites. So be on the lookout for the new theme!

The coolest feature so far is the one-click plugin upgrade. It sure beats deactivating, downloading, unzipping, uploading, activating and finally configuring after 5-10 minutes of setup. Now, it takes seconds!

It may take me a while to get used to the interface, but I do like it better than my initial impression. I really don’t like that most of the interface is a fixed width; the fluid design made things much less crammed together, but I do see the benefits in it (Most people have fixed width themes, so why have huge writing panels? Also, you can now write in full screen mode.).

All of my plugins upgraded successfully, save my ‘related posts’ plugin. I’ll fix that soon!

Overall, I like the upgrade and can’t wait to take full advantage of it.

I’ll have a new post soon with some more SEO tips!

Be sure to checkout my post on online reputation management profiles.

WordPress Tip 1. Use The Title Tag Correctly

Making the best use of your title tag can make a huge a difference in how people find your site. Search engines base the title in the SERP on your title tag and if you don’t sell the content in that one line, chances are you won’t sell it at all.

The following code enables your site to make better use of your post titles and blog description. Basically it says that if you are viewing a post, a page, or an archive that it should display the title of that page in the title tag and if it is anything else (i.e. the home page) then it should display the description of the blog. This means that you should make sure your blog’s description is very relevant to your site’s content.

<?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title('',true); } else { bloginfo('description'); } ?>

Source: Pearsonified

WordPress Tip 2. Direct Bots To Your Content

You’ve got a lot of great content and you want people to find it in as many places as possible, but Google doesn’t like duplicated content - no problem. Michael Gray outlines how to organize your content in such a way that bots can easily find your content.

His advice is geared more towards brand new sites, but another solution is the Meta Robots plugin. This plugin blocks bots from following and/or indexing pages on your site.

For example, I’m using the Meta Robots plugin to prevent the indexing of these pages:

• The login and register pages
• All admin pages
• Author pages
• Date-based archives
• Tag archives

In addition I’m using the plugin to add nofollow to these:

• Nofollow category listings on pages
• Nofollow category listings on single posts
• Nofollow outbound links on the frontpage
• Nofollow login and registration links

Joost de Valk’s SEO blog is an excellent source of WordPress tips.

WordPress Tip 3. RSS Is Super Powerful

For the normal person RSS is just a really handy way to get their favorite blogs in one spot. Awesome.

However, what is even better is the resulting SEO of RSS.

RSS has the potential to push your content to SERPs quicker than not utilizing it. We all know that if you write a new post you’ve got to wait for the Google bot to come by and snatch up the new content and then display in the SERPs. WRONG.

What I’ve found out is that by utilizing FeedBurner, you enable your content to be pushed to SERPs nearly immediately. Your content hasn’t even been chached yet! Google recognizes that your content is fresh, and therefore may be more relevant to searches and gives it better results than others (others that you normally WOULDN’T beat).

So get yourself a FeedBurner account!

WordPress Tip 4. Post Frequently and/or Consistently

Bots know to return to sites more often when they recognize that content is being created…more often. This can ensure that all of your content is being indexed and tells search engines that you’re alive, producing new, fresh content. Even if you aren’t posting everyday, some sort of a routine is good to keep bots coming back regularly.

WordPress Tip 5. Site Maps

I’m not talking about the site map that you link to in your footer. I’m talking about the one-time-plugin-install that automatically creates a site map for you and pings the search engines, alerting them that you have new content. The best plugin for this is, of course, the Google Sitemaps Generator.

The site map is standardized and can be read by Google, Ask, Yahoo!, and MSN. Auto generate your site map and forget about it.

Download the Google Sitemaps Generator.

WordPress Tip 6. Secure Your Site

Matt Cutts suggested three things to lock down your site and keep hackers out:

1. Prevent access to your wp-admin directory from unauthorized IP addresses via an .htaccess file
2. Make an empty index.html file in your plugins directory to avoid people gaining access to your current plugins
3. Always update to the newest version of WordPress so that publicly released security flaws don’t catch up with you

Source: Three tips to protect your WordPress installation

Matt sometimes posts some great WordPress tips as well, so check his blog out.

WordPress Tip 7. Speed Your Site Up and Don’t Run the Risk of the “Digg Effect”

Hopefully you’re writing good enough content that someday may be worthy of the “Digg Effect” (captivating so many people that your site goes down at a most critical point). Of course you can’t assure perfection without spending the big bucks, but there are some things to keep yourself alive during these times.

The WP-Cache plugin is the single-most common and easiest way to speed your site up. It simply caches pages as they are visited and automatically dumps the cache at a custom interval (default is an hour).

For more advanced methods of caching and speed improvement, visit Elliot Back’s “WordPress Improvement: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours”

WordPress Tip 8. For Media: podPress

There is no other plugin as easy to use for rich media than podPress. With this single install you can upload almost any media file (audio or video) and have it play via a player of your choice right in your blog - complete with an assortment of customization options. In addition, turn your media into a podcast and let podPress do all the work. This is a very powerful plugin and can be used in all sorts of ways.

I can’t wait to start using it more. Download podPress here.

WordPress Tip 9. Use a Related Posts Plugin

A lot of times organic visitors have found content that they like. Assuming they made it all the way to the bottom of your post (or wherever your choose to put it) they might encounter a list of related posts. This is nearly essential. Again, they found content they like, so if you’ve written other posts around the same subject they will most likely be interested in those as well. Keep people clicking and moving around your site.

Download the Similar Posts plugin.

WordPress Tip 10. Use the Yahoo! User Interface Library

One of the best things Yahoo! has done has been releasing the YUI Library. For a good number of benefits, you are better off creating your themes using this - you won’t regret it. Read my “Easy Workflow for Site Creation” post.

In Conclusion

Hopefully I’ve been able to provide some useful tips. As more come in I’ll continue to compile them and share them with you as I learn. After all, that’s what makes WordPress so great!

Feel free to share your tips below!

Well, I’m pretty disappointed in the new design. What confuses me even more is that the overwhelming support for the Shuttle design seems to have been completely ignored, and instead, WordPress’ attention was put into a poor attempt at a color makeover (there seem to be some new features and re-organization, but really…).

Well I contacted Khaled (Shuttle designer) to see if he would want to partner with me in actually creating the Shuttle theme. I’d love to see Shuttle in use. How about you guys?