Most Popular Article Searches
Some of you may have noticed that I added a feature on the home page of our website (on the right side) that is labelled "Most Popular Searches". I think that this is a cool feature to add, partly because it's gold for search engines and partly because I think that it will be fun and interesting for our users. Here's what it does and how it works.
First, every time an article search is performed on our website, the server will check to see if anyone else has done that search before. If not, it remembers the search terms and records that only one person has done that search. If it does find that the search has been performed before it will increment the number of times that it has been performed, therefor recording the popularity. At least, that is the simplified version. The idea being that on the home page the recent searches will reflect live data of what are visitors are searching for.
In addition, I have ambitions of linking in the popular searches data stored in our database to create a "live search" function for the article search box. Essentially every time you would type in a letter to that search box, it would offer suggestions for your search based on the most popular searches data. This one is pure flair though, and will probably have to wait a bit until I get more useful things wrapped up.
On the SEO side, I wanted to get the spiders to blast through some search results pages. By definition the articles listed on those pages are relevant to each other, so it's obvious why we would want spiders hitting these pages. By keeping the variable passed to that page (ugly dynamic URL) to only one, it shouldn't affect the indexing of these pages, althought I may end up cleaning those URLs up here soon.
Let me know if this little feature is coming in handy for anyone. I'll try to post about what I see with the search engines as they pick up the links. I'll be posting about Analytics on our new site here in the next few days.
