Landing Sites Problem and My Fix
The Landing Sites Wordpress plugin is very cool. It will show what people were searching for in their search engine on your site, and then bring up a set amount of related entries to the search. Here is an example of a search for Tainan Restaurant:
tainan restaurant
You came here from www.google.com searching for tainan restaurant. These posts might be of interest:
* The Hangout
* Hari Om Indian Restaurant Tainan
* The Corner Restaurant Tainan
* BOSA Egyptian Restaurant ?????? Tainan
* Turkish House Restaurant Turkish Cuisine Tainan
So, basically the first thing people will see on your site is a list of related entries based on the keyword(s) they were looking for. This is a nice way to reduce the bounce rate of a site and increase your page views as well.
This is a plugin that caused me a lot of grief however. It just wouldn’t work on The Real Taiwan, and I ended up going down an ugly path where I kept digging my hole deeper and deeper until finally, I nuked my theme so badly that I didn’t want to fix it. It was also time to upgrade to Wordpress 2.2 and use a widget theme though, so I took the opportunity to start again with a new theme and use Wordpress 2.2.
If you are asking if I got the landing sites plugin to work, the answer is yes, and it works beautifully. How did I do it? I ended up downloading the German version, changed some words to English, and then added a CSS div for it and now it is wonderful, everything I could ask of it. Here is a little tutorial on how to add the proper CSS and get the plugin working on your site if you had problems with it like I did.
1) Download the landing sites plugin here
2) Re-upload it to the plugins folder on your server
3) Activate the plugin within the plugin tab in your Wordpress.
4) Add this code to your single.php file in the proper spot (and page.php file if you want to include the landing sites plugin to your pages as well as posts):
<?php if (function_exists('ls_getinfo')) : ?>
<?php if (ls_getinfo('isref')) { ?>
<div class="landingsites">
<h2><?php ls_getinfo('terms'); ?></h2>
<p>You came here from <?php ls_getinfo(referrer); ?> searching for <i><?php ls_getinfo(terms); ?></i>. These posts might be of interest:</p>
<ul>
<?php ls_related(5, 10, '<li>', '</li>', '', '', false, false); ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php } ?>
<?php endif; ?>
5) If you want some guidance, here it is. Find this code: <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> and drop the code from step 4 in the line after it.
6) Add this code to your Style.css file. Drop it in at the very end. Also, you will want to change the colors and width to suit your theme. Do it.
.landingsites{
line-height: 15px;
border: 1px #ff9933;
border-style: double;
width: 350px;
margin: 12px 12px 12px 12px;
padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;
}
You should be good to go now after all that. Now do a search that you know will score a high ranking for your site. Click on your site and then see how the landing sites plugin works for you! I love it myself.
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[...] I did not take this photo. “Extra Ketchup” did. It is displayed using the Random Flickr Photo 2 Plugin for Wordpress
Adding Adsense to the Landing Sites Wordpress plugin seems like a natural choice for anyone wishing to monetize their sites. The plugin offers the user related choices from your site, so why not use some related choices form Google Adsense as well. Here is how to do it. You may want to read up on my previous post about the Landing Sites plugin. [...]