This morning I have added a new site search to this blog to make life easier for anyone wishing to find some of my older posts now that I have moved across onto the .co.uk version of my domain.

I tried this out with the standard Wordpress search functionality but have never been impressed with the results. So I installed my own, it looks like this: -

But you can see that as its right there on the sidebar, hey its Sunday morning and my head hurts OK?

The advantages of the new search system are: -

It ranks the search results better

It offers suggestions as you type (I love that feature!)

It indexes sub directories of the blog

The last one is the key for me as I have a number of tools off the main blog on their own pages and this well search them too. Cachechecker is an example of this, heres the search page for it

Last job to do is set up a Cron job on the server to re-index the site every day.

So how can this be done? Thought you’d never ask…

I am using Sphider which is a free PHP based spider. Very quick and simple to set up and offers a huge number of features.

Its installed on a subfolder on the site and then I just copied and pasted the search form into the blogs sidebar, bit of css and we are good to go.

Let me know how it works for you!

Incidently loving POPrl at the moment for sharing this link

Over the past two weeks I have finally given into the pressure to use Twitter, its amazing how addictive it is.

So after just a few weeks I have come to a few conclusions about the best ways to Tweet.

1. Get a decent client
Many people use the basic web interface but that makes Tweeting a task like reading and replying to email. I have been using Tweetdeck which runs as a separate application and makes Tweeting quick easy and part of the days background.

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Had a great time at SEOroadshow over the weekend but a couple of the conversations I had got me thinking. I know thats unusual but bear with me and we will see what falls out of my fuzzy brain this morning…

When running a typical link building campaign most agencies and SEO’s will do the normal things to make sure they minimise the potential footprint of the campaign itself.

• They will make sure they spread the links around
• They will vary the footprints and anchors
• Etc etc

But most people will have a set of criteria that they will look for when finding places to buy build links and one of the factors people use will inevitably be PR.

I know all the debates about what PR is actually good for and im not going to get into that, lets just say that as a indicator of crawl frequency it does offer us a good insight into how the campaign will be perceived by the search engines

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