A couple of weeks ago one of my fellow b5media directors or bloggers (I can’t remember which) sent me a link to a WP plugin that they thought looked pretty cool. I didn’t have time to really look into it at the time but today have decided to give it a go here at ProBlogger.
It’s a plugin that very few of you (as regular readers) will notice in action – but is one that new readers coming from Search Engines will hopefully benefit from.
The plugin is Landing Sites 1.3 by The Undersigned.
This plugin shows visitors who have arrived on the blog a special welcome message and some suggested posts that relate to the search that they’ve done to get to the blog just above the post that they’ve landed on itself.
The best way to illustrate it is to go to Google and do a search for “How to Surf blog traffic Tsunamis” – then click on the link to ProBlogger.net (it should be the #1 result). This will take you to one of my individual posts that has a list of 5 suggested posts just above my post.
Another WP plugin that does a similar thing is the MoreMoney plugin which I discovered today after spotting it on Weblog Tools Collection. MoreMoney also senses when a visitor comes from a search engine and lets you include a number of things to them including a welcome message or advertising (for example you might want to put in an AdSense ad that will only be seen by SE visitors but not your regular readers.
I’m yet to try out MoreMoney but the Landing Sites plugin does seem to be working well as I’ve already noticed a slight increase in the number of page views per visitor. The obvious benefit of Landing Sites is that it drives traffic deeper into your blog.
This plugin will of course work best with blogs that do get search engine traffic – blogs that are yet to get ranked in SE’s might want to install it for that time that they do but they’re not really going to get much benefit from it in the short term.
