A Powerful WordPress Plugin For Increasing Your Traffic

Posted to Building Blog Traffic

I keep coming across more and more fantastic free plugins for WordPress (yet another reason to make the switch to the WordPress Blogging Platform). This plugin is a particularly handy one to help visitors who come to your blog from a search engine such as Google find the answers they are looking for, and thus spend more time at your blog.

Download Plugin: Landing Sites

When a person does a web search and one of your blog’s articles show up in the results it may not exactly match the topic they are searching for, however some of your other blog posts might. This plugin, called “Landing Sites”, allows you to include a short welcome message and links to more of your blog articles whenever a visitor clicks through from a search engine.

Confused? Okay, here is an example. Click this link - Niche Content Sites - and you will be taken to the Google search results for that phrase. On the page should be a link to my site - www.entrepreneurs-journey.com. Click the link within the Google results and you will be taken to my site but just before the article you will see a welcome message with links to more articles within my blog.

The welcome message is only generated when someone clicks through from search engines. So far I’ve tested it and it seems to work for all the big search engines except for Yahoo. MSN Search, Google and Ask.com all worked fine.

Your blog may or may not have good search engine rankings yet but regardless this plugin is a must have because it helps convert search visitors into retained readers. Search visitors usually have very specific questions and a VERY short attention span. The more you can do to provide potential answers to their questions and keep them on your site, the better your chance of establishing some form of relationship with them, once they start to see the value your blog represents.

Installing the plugin is easy - just upload and activate. Then you will need to copy some code into your blog template files. This is the trickier part and if you are not used to playing with your blog’s theme files be careful, maybe ask someone with HTML skills to help you.

Blog Traffic School Recommended Plugins

In Blog Traffic School I’ve included a list of every plugin I use on my blogs to improve my traffic. There are a handful of really powerful plugins, like this landing site one I just covered, that can have a dramatic impact on your traffic yet take only two seconds to install. The beauty of plugins is that they are free and automatic. Once you set them up they perform functions that are dynamic and powerful.

Blog Traffic School is coming very, very soon…

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King

Comments

Edmund Pelgen

June 13th, 2006 | 2:40 pm

Hi Yaro,

As a new blogger who has hopes to use his blog to promote his internet marketing services, I appreciate the comments you have on this blog. Especially the recent post about stopping reading other blogs for a while to allow you to get on with your own content. I know this problem all too well…

As a fellow wordpress user I do have a query about this blog you are currently running which I hope you don’t mind pointing me in the direction of a solution. Firstly, how are you creating those yellow highlight boxes with the dotted borders? Are you using some form of fancy wysywig editor or simply editing the html. Also, I note this blog uses a very simple template and the posts look like the “sales letter” formats you see on the net so often. Are you editing your own themes or do you have someone you outsource to?

I’d appreciate any pointers if you have the time. Also great work with the blogs, there is great trajectory building and I am sure I’ll see your face in one of those Today Show editorials on blogging quite soon.

Cheers and Good luck with the course.

Edmund
Yaro

June 13th, 2006 | 7:18 pm

Hi Edmund - the yellow boxes are HTML with CSS. I’m average with CSS and good with HTML so I can do some custom things like the yellow boxes, however most of the time I just copy other people’s code, which I think was the case for the yellow dotted outline boxes. Just view source on my code if you want to use it.

Regarding the wordpress themes - this one here is a very old theme called “classic letter” or something like that which I have custom modified myself, adding the graphic header etc. If you look around you can find hundreds of really great wordpress themes for free though. I’m sure there are many you would like, just google “wordpress themes”.

For some of the more complex design work I do outsource because it’s more efficient.

I’ll have lists of things like were I get themes in the course in case anyone is interested.

Hope that helps!
Edmund Pelgen

June 14th, 2006 | 12:31 am

Hi Yaro,

All very helpful information. Thank you for your reply.

Edmund
David

June 14th, 2006 | 11:31 am

Hi Yaro,

Isn’t this the same thing that Related WordPress Plugin does? Well, it does not detect the SE from where the visitor comes but it displays a list of related posts just like the Landing Sites Plugin.

So what makes it different from Relates Wordpress Plugins?
Yaro

June 14th, 2006 | 12:17 pm

David - close! The related posts plugin has the same function to bring up posts based on keywords in the current article, and you can put the related posts anywhere but there are significant differences with the landing sites plugin - it only shows up when a search engine visitors comes through and uses the keywords from the search phrase they used.

Related posts uses the keywords from the current article and is always “on”.

These two plugins serve quite different purposes in this regard, although I’d recommend using both. With the landing sites plugin you can position the links to articles right at the start so it’s the first thing they see but only search visitors will see when they come from a search engine. To standard visitors it never displays.

Give it a go and I think you will see the value of this plugin.
Bryan C. Fleming

June 15th, 2006 | 3:38 am

Thanks for the Tip Yaro. I’ll add that to a few word-press Blogs I’m starting up.

- Bryan
Ismael

November 1st, 2006 | 12:58 am

Hello,
Just wondering if anyone could help. I did something stupid and started my blog using a numerical archive system, and now I'd like to change it so that the post title is part of the URL for SEO reasons. Is there any Wordpress plugins that anyone knows of that could switch it without sending Googlers to invalid pages? Maybe some sort of redirector to the correct page?

Thanks.
Yaro

November 7th, 2006 | 3:52 am

Hi Ismael,

I believe if you turn on permalinks on a WordPress blog then the old numeric system works fine (if it is the default id=XX that is). So essentially with permalinks it works either via the word permalink or the article id since wordpress uses a mod_rewrite to assign the permalink to the id.

If that is the case you are fine, just switch on permalinks and all your old links will continue to function.
Axel

November 18th, 2006 | 3:15 am

Does anyone know the name of the wordpress plugin that creates a list of your posts in a category instead of just displaying them one after the other? I want it so that when someone clicks on a category they just get a list of posts from that category.

I'm sure Ive seen one…and sifting through the WP site is a nightmare
Yaro

November 28th, 2006 | 3:45 am

Hi Axel,

I don’t know the plug-in that does that, but I’m sure it is possible.

Have you tried searching wordpress.org for it?
Declan

December 13th, 2006 | 7:12 am

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.
Yaro

December 15th, 2006 | 5:42 pm

Declan - I don’t know of a plugin that does that and I’m actually curious why you would want to?