Spruce Up Your Search Results

Optimizing for the search engines is often at the forefront of every site owners’ mind, but what about the search on your own site? If you offer search functionality on your site (and I don’t know why you wouldn’t), why not add some “curbside appeal”, and really make it usable for your visitors? Small tweaks can make a big difference in helping your search stand out.

1) Clue users in

Give your readers a little clue about what keyphrase they just searched for by adding a simple statement like “your search for [whatever] returned the following:”.

This is very useful if your reader performs more than one search. It gives an indication that the phrase they entered is actually the one that was searched for, and is returning relevant results. It’s particularly beneficial if you have closely related topics which might return similar results. Without a visual que, a user might think your search isn’t working properly if they aren’t seeing different returns.

You can also use CSS to style the keyword or phrase so it stands out even more with an eye-catching color, as with <em> or <strong> tags as shown in the example.

2) Show them more

Depending on the settings of your Reading tab preferences, you might only be showing your visitors one post per page. I prefer this approach to multiple posts, but unfortunately it affects search and archive listings as well. No one wants to search your vault one entry at a time. By using the Custom Query String plugin¹, you can customize the number of results listings by a number of variables. Very handy.

Update: (9/28/07) With the release of 2.3, this plugin has now become obsolete, as it references a table in the database which no longer exists.

3) Open your pages

The default search provided by Wordpress only searches through your dated material. In other words, your posts. No Pages are included in that search unless you make use of the Search Everything plugin, which allows Pages and comments to be queried as well. A word of warning though… I’ve run into some trouble getting CQS and Search Everything to work together. Something about the combination (at least I think that’s the problem) seems to be disabling relevant results. What I mean is, the search works, but it produces the same results every time, no matter what you search for. If anyone has already experienced this problem and knows of a work-around I’d love to hear of it! :)

4) Cinch up your layout

If you don’t like the way the_excerpt() template tag works in Wordpress, you can tweak that a bit too, but using the following snippet in its place:

Rather than having weird line breaks in your passage which the_excerpt() causes depending on your html, you can condense everything to display in one paragraph, and customize the number of words in your excerpt (represented by 50 above). This is nice for tightening up your search results and/or archive listings. I’m really bad about remembering to write in optional excerpts in my posts, so this works great for me.

5) Put your sidebar to work

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers monetize their search pages via contextual ads, which makes a lot of sense… but if you choose not to go that route you can still make good use of empty space by putting in other maintenance-free items such as related posts, popular posts, etc. This can help to guide visitors back into the funnel, so to speak. :)

Tags: code | content-management | plugins | usability