ibis70
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Mar 8, 2009, 11:29 AM
Post #1 of 8
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Discussing the "Related articles tutorial" and more needs
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I was wondering if anybody agrees with me that the Related articles tutorial really should offer us more possibilities.
Related articles is probably the most important functionality you can give your visitors to link deeper in your website.
If you have high bounce rates but your content is attracting lots of visitors (like mine) getting your website to be sticky is something you'll be working on all the time.
What related articles does is gives us a very limited option to add some articles to an article page which you hope visitors will click through.
However you can only use one word which corresponds or connects the articles. So imagine that I have an article which is about green widgets and blue widgets and an one discussing shades of "blue".
I'd be able to connect two articles using keyword "widget" however I can't connect the article about blue widgets to the article about shades of blue anymore.
Reason is that I obviously used up my one allowed keyword on "widget" by connecting the articles about widgets.
Its one of the ONLY very big limitations of Article MAnager right now. I hope we can find a better solution and make our websites better and get people linking deeper giving tem more option to explore our content.
My ideas on solving this issue, would anyone care to comment??:
Say we add a database field and name this field something like: main keyword
This field will allow us to add just one keyword to the article in this particular field.
We keep the current field for keywords intact.
We build a custom search query NOT to search for "keywords" but to only search our new field "main keyword".
The results are generated into the RelatedArticles template or another template.
Why do I think this could be an option?
The Keywords are actually very useful as header meta data. (I added the keywords field to the header (with commas separating the keywords) and its ended up being much more useful for Search Engine Optimization purposes.
You can still do a search on your keywords but in addition you have the option to connect certain articles by a second word, in this case: "main keyword". You could add a third or even a fourth keyword using this method even though it could get kind of messy if you use different versions of the related articles template to display the data links.
Anybody care to comment on this? or perhaps help me put it together??
I've tried it but up to now its not really working mostly because I don't really understand how to manipulate the search results string:
"<!-- templateIf : $article.mainkeyword$ ne "" -->
<!--#include virtual="$settings.searchurl$?action=search&keywordSearchFields=mainkeyword&mainkeyword=$article.mainkeyword$&template=searchEngine/relatedArticles.html&perpage=10" --> "
P.S. This is what I put in the meta data in the header to generate the keywords for good SEO: <meta name="Keywords" http-equiv="Keywords" content="$article.keyword$" />
(This post was edited by ibis70 on Mar 8, 2009, 11:30 AM)
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