weblog

Capitalising on Google keyword referrers

Logged Wednesday, 17th April 2002 - Search Engines - Perma-Link - Comments (0)

As I get around 100 referrers a day to my site from Google search requests, I was pondering ways I could better leverage the 1,700 individually indexed pages of content there are on this site to suggest other pages that may be of interest. I've already done it to some extent by having each page on the site categorised. For example, this entry is categorised "Search Engines", so whenever you view this entry on it's own page by clicking the perma-link, a related links popup shows all other pages on my site categorised "Search Engines", but that's pretty limiting as pages in other categories may also be appropriate. So what I'm experimenting with now is a bit of personalisation through initially tracking what a Google visitor typed into the search engine to get to my site, and then performing a transparent search across all the content on the site to suggest related content based on those keywords, rather than just the category of the page they arrived at. I also store those keywords in a cookie so they can be used from page to page as they browse. Anyway, this isn't live yet, it's still sitting in my unfinished code pile. An interesting experiment anyway. I wonder if sites like Amazon leverage search keywords in referrers for personalisation.. probably.