Search Meter Wordpress Plugin

I came across the Search Meter Wordpress plugin the other day and have been playing with it. I am not sure how I ever missed this one as it is fantastic. It is yet another free plugin that tracks what your visitors are searching for on your site. Full details of recent searches are available, as are statistics for the previous day, week or month, including whether or not users are finding what they are looking for. The thing I like in addition to the stats is how you can show 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. Make sure you give this great plugin a workout.

eBay Search Commands In Your BANS Stores

One of the most under utilized features in the Build A Niche Store software is the feature that allows you to filter out items you do not want showing on your store pages. You are doing yourself and your niche store surfers a disservice by not giving them EXACTLY what they are looking for and what you are advertising as being able to give them. Surfers are getting more and more time crunched and want to find exactly what they are searching for in the shortest amount of time.

Lets say you sale blue widgets for example. A default set up in your niche store might show blue widgets, wheels for blue widgets, blue widget cup holders and blue widget accessories. Get my drift? I know you have seen it before. One of the best search term operators is the minus sign. Lets look below:
























you see we have the search term blue widgets and then -(cup), this will throw out anything with cup in the title. Now you can use multiple words separated by a comma and no spaces like this...

blue widgets -(cup,cups,wheel,wheels,red)

This will effectively weed out most of the junk out of the items showing on your store pages. Here is a complete list of eBay search commands to play around with. Start giving your surfers exactly what they are looking for and you likely get them back as a repeat customer as well.

Move around and change BANS store search feature

I highly recommend that everyone play around with not only moving the BANS store search feature, but also changing the type of search bar as well. There are many types of formats you can use that are already included in the Build A Niche Store software.

If you open up the header file you will notice the statement below:
search()

You can change that to any of the commands below:

searchnoadvanced()
searchnotitle()
searchbasic()
searchside()
searchsidenoadvanced()
searchsidenotitle()
searchsidebasic()

You can also adjust the size of the attributes in the styles.css file as well. It is listed in the #search category of the styles section.

I usually like to put mine on in the right hand column and use the location of where the current search form is for some long tail keyword phrases. Play around with the different commands to see the different ways you can display it.

New search box in your niche store

If you have ever wanted to move your search box to the 3rd column in the 3 column template, this is how you do it:

I suggest backing up your frontcontrol.php file first in case you want to go back to the original file in the future.

Then open frontcontrol.php in notepad and replace the searchside function with this code posted in this thread:
http://www.buildanichestore.com/members/viewtopic.php?p=29581#29581

save and ftp your new frontcontrol.php file back to your server.

Find the following piece of code inside your styles.css file:

Code:

.searchform { padding:0; margin:0; width:390px; }

And change it to:

Code:

.searchform { padding:0; margin:0; width:143px; }

Also change search select to 200px

#search select {
width: 200px;
}

Delete search();?> from your header.php. Open your footer.php and find this line:

Sponsored Links

Directly underneath that add this code like this:

Sponsored Links>

searchside();?>