Latest version is 2.3, released on 28 August 2007.
Search Meter is a WordPress plugin that helps you keep your blog focused on what your visitors want to read. It does this by keeping track of what your visitors are searching for.
If you have a Search box on your blog, Search Meter automatically records what people are searching for — and whether they are finding what they are looking for. Search Meter’s admin interface shows you what people have been searching for in the last couple of days, and in the last week or month. It also shows you which searches have been unsuccessful. If people search your blog and get no results, they’ll probably go elsewhere. With Search Meter, you’ll be able to find out what people are searching for, and give them what they want by creating new posts on those topics.
You can also show your readers what the most popular searches are. The Popular Searches widget displays a configurable list of recent popular successful search terms on your blog, with each term hyperlinked to the actual search results. There’s also a Recent Searches widget, which simply displays the most recent searches. If you are happy to edit your theme, both of these functions are also available as template tags.
Search Meter installs easily and requires no configuration. Just install it, activate it, and it starts tracking your visitors’ searches. Here’s a screenshot of the administration interface, showing some of the reports you’ll get. Click the image for a full-size view.
Compatibility
Search Meter has been tested successfully with WordPress versions from 1.5 to 2.5.1, and should also work with newer versions as they are released.
Download and Install
- Download the search-meter.php file (see the end of this article for download location).
- Copy search-meter.php into your WordPress plugins directory (wp-content/plugins).
- Log in to WordPress Admin. Go to the Plugins page and click Activate for Search Meter.
View Statistics
To see your search statistics, Log in to WordPress Admin, go to the Dashboard page and click Search Meter. You’ll see the most popular searches in the last day, week and month. Click “Last 100 Searches” or “Last 500 Searches” to see lists of all recent searches.
Manage Statistics
There are a couple of management option available if you go to the Options page and click Search Meter. Use the Reset Statistics button to clear all past search statistics; Search Meter will immediately start gathering fresh statistics. If you’re technically-minded, you might want to check the “Keep detailed information” checkbox to make Search Meter save technical information about every search (the information is taken from the HTTP headers).
Popular and Recent Searches
The Popular Searches widget displays a list of the most popular successful search terms on your blog during the last 30 days. The Recent Searches widget displays a simple list of the most recent successful search terms. In both cases, the search terms in the lists are hyperlinked to the actual search results; readers can click the search term to show the results for that search. Also, you can configure the maximum number of searches that each widget will display.
To add these widgets to your sidebar, log in to WordPress Admin, go to the Presentation page and click Widgets. You can drag the appropriate widget to the sidebar of your choice, and click the Configure button to set the number of searches to display.
Widget support depends on the version of WordPress and the theme you’re using. In some cases you will not be able to use the widgets. In any case, you can always use the Search Meter template tags to display the same information. You’ll need to edit your theme to use them.
The sm_list_popular_searches() template tag displays a list of the 5 most popular successful search terms on your blog during the last 30 days. Each term is a hyperlink; readers can click the search term to show the results for that search. Here are some examples of using this template tag.
sm_list_popular_searches()
Show a simple list of the 5 most popular recent successful search terms, hyperlinked to the actual search results.
sm_list_popular_searches('<h2>Popular Searches</h2>')
Show the list as above, with the heading “Popular Searches”. If there have been no successful searches, then this tag displays no heading and no list.
sm_list_popular_searches('<li><h2>Popular Searches</h2>', '</li>')
Show the headed list as above; this form of the tag should be used in the default WordPress theme. Put it in the sidebar.php file.
sm_list_popular_searches('<li><h2>Popular Searches</h2>', '</li>', 10)
This is the same as the above, but it shows the 10 most popular searches.
sm_list_recent_searches()
Show a simple list of the 5 most recent successful search terms, hyperlinked to the actual search results. You can also use the same options as for the sm_list_popular_searches tag.
Problems, questions or requests?
If you find any problems, please let me know by leaving a comment at the bottom of this page. You can also leave a comment if you have any questions about how it works, or if you would like to request a feature.
Download
You can download search-meter.php or view the source code. The files are hosted externally — if there’s a problem with them you can download a recent version hosted on this site. Don’t forget to check out all the other plugins available here — there’s bound to be one that you will find useful.
I write these WordPress plugins because I enjoy doing it, but it does take up a lot of my time. If you think this plugin is useful, please consider donating some appropriate amount by clicking here. Thank you.
Full WordPress plugin list
- Code Markup — Quickly paste code samples into your posts -- you can even include HTML markup in the code sample.
- Evermore — Automatically display a short preview of your posts on the home page and other multiple-post pages, along with a link to the full post.
- FixBack — Ensure trackbacks and pingbacks are sent with the correct link back to your blog.
- Less — Change the (more...) link so it jumps to the full post, not just the part after the link.
- Plaintext — Allow your readers to download source files (e.g. PHP, HTML, ASP) as plain text.
- Safe Title — Use HTML in post titles in the default WordPress theme (or any other theme).
- Search Meter — Find out what people are searching for on your blog, so you can write what your visitors want to read.
- Top Cat — Specify a main category for your posts, and use template tags to display posts differently according to their main category.
616 responses
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Does this mean that this WP plug in can be used to optimize more on targetted texts for AdSense use? Just a concern and thank you for providing it here.
Hello, I am using your plugin here: http://tinyurl.com/5bdxoc
My issue is that the recent posts are posting 2 sometimes 3 times with 1 search. This is the code I am using:
<?php sm_list_popular_searches(’Popular Searches’, ”, 15); ?>
<?php sm_list_recent_searches(’Recent Searches’, ”, 15); ?>
What is causing this unwanted output and how to I fix it to show the most recent search only once?
The code did not output correctly, I will try with the code tags:
[code]<?php sm_list_popular_searches(’Popular Searches’, ”, 15); ?>
<?php sm_list_recent_searches(’Recent Searches’, ”, 15); ?>[/code]
Joshua, I’m not sure what is causing this. You can help me find out by doing the following.
1. Go to your Search Meter Options page
2. Check the “Keep detailed information about recent searches” option
3. Go to your site and do some searches that show up multiple times
4. Go to your Search Meter Statistics page
5. Select Last 100 Searches
6. Click “Show Details”
7. Copy and paste the results into an email and send it to me. My name is Bennett and this site is thunderguy.com, so I’m sure you can figure out my email address…
There is already some code in Search Meter to avoid duplicate entries, but it seems that it’s not foolproof. Thanks in advance for helping me improve it.
Dear Bennett,
I’ve been using your search meter plugin for a while now. Yesterday I migrated the blog to another server. Everything works fine, except the sm_list_recent_searches returns only 1 search result (and not 5 as it was set to display on the previous server). I haven’t edited anything, just copied. I suspect it might have something to do with SElinux being active on the new server while it wasn’t active on the previous one. I tried deactivating SElinux, but result was the same.
Do you have any suggestions what I could do?
Best Regards,
Andrej
Hi Bennett. I sent you an email. I found out that this plugin interferes with the nice search plugin I have installed (http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/nice-search/)
Is it possible to use both of these plugins simultaneously without getting duplicate outputs for each search?
Joshua, I’ll check out the Nice Search plugin and see what I can do. Thanks for your help so far.
Andrej, SElinux probably is not the problem. I’ll see if I can figure out what’s happening. It would help if you could follow the 7 steps in my comment above and send me the results. Thanks.
By the way, your site is quite interesting!
Email sent
Dear Bennett,
Any updates on the above topic? You’re my only hope in resolving this issue..
Best Regards,
Andrej
first off all, thanks for this great plugin. I just one small problem related to the generated page by the search term. I want to change the meta-title of the generated page into “searched term | blog name ” . This is important for onpage optimization.
Now the meta titleon the generated page by thee search term is just “blog name” .
Any solutions? My site is http://www.citate-celebre.com
nevermind, the problem was solved with all in one seo plugin
search meter hyperlink does not working
Andrej and Joshua, I am still looking at your respective issues. I don’t have much spare time just now so it will take some time.
Divya, everything seems to work fine for me. Please let me know if you still have problems, and tell me which URL is failing. Thanks.
Bennett, Super plugin indeed, Thanks,
There is a problem with unicode characters when someone use them for search. Greek characters to be more specific. Is there any fix for that or theres nothing i can do?
Every search that is in unicode look like that: “??????????”
Thanks
thanks man nice site nice blog
hi, this is nice plugin but is it possible display results like a tag cloud?
Thank you.
Seems pretty handy. Certainly would help in writing for the readers if you know what they want to read.
Very cool. Thanks for the info.
Other comment pages: « 1 … 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 [31]