LJ Longtail SEO

October 16th, 2009 Leave a comment Go to comments

LJ Longtail SEO is a tool that detects search engine visits and uses this information to display a list of links based on second page search results.

The results in the database are aged off based on customizable settings so that once your longtail keywords have been boosted they will fall off the list and give way for other searches.

Admin interface has an optional keyword report that can be turned on via an option (On a large blog it is possible that there could be a performance hit on the admin page when using this option. Please note this will not slow down the blog side, just the admin page.). The keyword report will show the Top 100 keywords ordered by popularity and also showing the number of times the keyword has occurred.

As of Version 1.5 the plugin you can now add keywords to an Ignore list. This means if you don’t want a certain keyword registering as a referred search term you can simply put the phrase into the Ignored Keywords list and it will no longer register.

A widget will display a list of the popular searches that have come from search engine result pages beyond the first and provide a link on your sidebar back to the pages found.

Using this method can help to increase traffic to a blog via bring more importance to the Longtail keywords that can be used to find a site.

The original idea for this plugin was taken from SEO Booster Lite and Second Page Poaching – Advanced White Hat SEO. I used the other plugin for a short period of time and didn’t like a few of the restrictions. Therefore I decided to make my own, there will be no Pro version or paid version. The version I release here is in production on my main blog. Any updates I make there will end up here including bugfixes.

This plugin currently only registers search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask. It is compatible with both of Googles current referrer information meaning you should always have accurate SERP positioning results.

Available from the Wordpress Plugin Gallery

  1. September 24th, 2009 at 19:58 | #1

    Hey – thanks for such a cool plugin, it’s a really neat idea. One little request though – could you provide some hints or a method to style the results, and maybe even an option to display the widget only to admins? Thanks again, Roger

  2. September 25th, 2009 at 07:55 | #2

    @Roger
    What kind of styling would you like? The widget should conform to whatever the theme specifies.

    With regards to showing the widget only to admin users, it kind of defeats the whole point of the plugin. The plugin is designed so that your second page and further search results get more attention. You could just not have the plugin added to your sidebar and easily see the results still in the admin interface.

    Cheers,

    Jon

  3. September 25th, 2009 at 14:07 | #3

    Is it possible to place it after the post rather than on a widget on the sidebar?? can it be placed manually?

  4. September 25th, 2009 at 14:26 | #4

    @anton
    The searches listed are sitewide. Therefore there would be no point in having it listed after the post (you could have a theme that provides sidebar support below the post to show them there?).

    Having said that, the relevant information is stored in the database with regards to individual posts and the search terms that found them.

    I may consider this to be added as a feature in a future release.

    Cheers,

    Jon

  5. September 25th, 2009 at 14:27 | #5

    @anton
    As an addition to that, I can create a function so you may place the output anywhere in your theme.

  6. Ricardo
    September 25th, 2009 at 23:07 | #6

    Hi,

    Is this plugin compatible with Wordpress 2.6.1?

    Best,

    Ricardo.

  7. September 26th, 2009 at 00:59 | #7

    @Jon Smith
    My apologies – I was able to do all the styling I wanted by adding various “#lj-longtail-seo {}” declarations to the main stylesheet. And yes, I see what you mean about not wanting to hide the widget. Thanks again for a great plugin.
    Cheers, Roger

  8. September 28th, 2009 at 06:04 | #8

    @Ricardo
    In theory it should be. I don’t have an installation that old to try it on. It would be great if you could try it for me.

    Thanks,

    Jon

  9. September 28th, 2009 at 06:19 | #9

    I get this error once installed and cannot make it work — any ideas anyone ?

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function register_sidebar_widget() in /home/garagewi/public_html/wp-content/plugins/lj-longtail-seo/lj-longtail-seo.php on line 31

  10. September 28th, 2009 at 06:55 | #10

    @derek
    @Ricardo
    2.8 is currently the only way forward. The issue with register_sidebar_widget will stop the plugin from being used below this version.

    Please upgrade your wordpress installations, in the mean time I will look into the backward compatibility issues and hopefully get it working for version below 2.8.

  11. September 28th, 2009 at 15:09 | #11

    @Ricardo
    @derek
    A new release has just been sent to Wordpress.org, Version 1.2 has backwards compatibility to WP2.5. This will fix the register_sidebar_widget issue.

    Cheers,

    Jon

  12. September 28th, 2009 at 21:54 | #12

    Just a quick tip about a bug. In the query list, international characters such as ø, å and æ doesn’t show.

  13. September 29th, 2009 at 16:10 | #13

    … and characters such as ä, ü and ö that would be great.
    Greatings

  14. September 29th, 2009 at 18:31 | #14

    @Thor Fredrik Eie
    @Olaf
    Hi,

    Thanks for the feedback. I am working on an update that will include international characters.

    Thanks,

    Jon

  15. October 2nd, 2009 at 20:02 | #15

    tnx, I will give it a try!
    Looks like a good plugin !

  16. October 8th, 2009 at 04:45 | #16

    Great plugin! Thanks.

    It would be useful if there was a way to delete specific keywords from appearing. I have a dog site and i’m getting some inappropriate (adult themed, yet dog related- we’ll leave it at that) results that i don’t want on my site.

  17. October 8th, 2009 at 08:48 | #17

    @The English Bulldog Guy
    I have just released Version 1.5 to the Wordpress.org plugin gallery. This version has an option to ignore keywords and to retrospectively remove keywords from the database.

    I also noted on your site that the Widget did not conform to your theme properly. I have hopefully fixed this as well.

    Cheers,

    Jon

  18. October 8th, 2009 at 12:23 | #18

    @Jon Smith
    wow just saw the update! thanks! talk about quick service.

    also i installed this on another site of mine and i’m getting very long alphanumeric codes in the results all starting with 2 underscores. just non-technically guessing here but it looks like it’s similar to the post ids from feedburner in google reader.

  19. October 8th, 2009 at 12:38 | #19

    @The English Bulldog Guy
    Would it be possible to get an export of the LJLongtailSEO table from the database of the other site so that i can see if i need to adjust anything for the plugin. If so you can email it to smithj@thelazysysadmin.net that would be great.

    Cheers,

    Jon

  20. October 9th, 2009 at 12:13 | #20

    nice plugin, ihave to try in my blog, its very easy and user friendly
    thanks for share

  21. October 10th, 2009 at 04:50 | #21

    Amazing plugin, thank you for your hard work. One of my websites in running a highly configured wordpress template that makes utilizing sidebar widgets very difficult. Is there a way to call this plugin with php and avoid the widget installation?

    I was thinking something along the lines of a php include() would be best, but may be able to use something else.

    Thanks again, I have used this plugin and similar ones on other wp blogs with great success. These longtails are to often overlooked, but are great for increasing numbers!

  22. October 10th, 2009 at 12:50 | #22

    @Patric
    Version 1.6 now has the ability to call a function to display the information without needing the widget.

    Thanks for the feedback,

    Jon

  23. October 12th, 2009 at 21:26 | #23

    Hi,
    Uploaded the plug-in but when i acticvate i get ‘fatal error’ message? Any hints- I have the latest WP version working.
    Many thanks

  24. October 13th, 2009 at 06:03 | #24

    @Andrew Porter
    Firstly is the fatal error still occurring? If so to reactivate your blog please delete or rename the lj-longtail-seo folder inside wp-content/plugins directory.

    Can you provide a copy of the error message when you activated.

    Cheers,

    Jon

  25. October 13th, 2009 at 08:30 | #25

    @Andrew Porter
    I have just installed a fresh clean version of 2.8.4 and was able to activate the plugin successfully.

    Are you on a hosted plan? Does the database user have permission to create a new table in the database?

    Cheers,

    Jon

  26. October 13th, 2009 at 18:39 | #26

    Hi JON,

    first of all thanks a lot for the Plugin. Its wonderfull and its FREE!!!

    I have the following “problem”.
    At my page in Plugin Menu at the section (Top 10 Search Queries) are shown the last 10 queris.. but at the section (Links that will be shown in widget) ther’s nothing :( and i can’t display the widget coz its a blank..
    Is this normal? Should i wait for links to generate or what? :)

    Thx in advance

    Romeo

  27. October 13th, 2009 at 19:43 | #27

    @Romeo
    You will need to wait for the plugin to register search results.

    If you leave the plugin enabled but dont have the widget in your sidebar it will start collecting the information it requires.

    Give it a couple of days.

    Cheers,

    Jon

  28. October 16th, 2009 at 02:10 | #28

    This is a really, really wonderful plugin!

    But i noticed two things:
    - Sometimes there are 2 or 3 links for the same page. This is senseless, because a rule in SEO says “first anchortext counts”. So I would prefer to keep just one of them. The others are irrelevant to Google.
    - My Blog is in German, i’m not sure if you’re using stoppwords, but if: is it possible to set a path in the configuration panel ? And if not: it could result in slightly better results ;o)

    [LJ Longtail SEO Admin]
    “Configure your stoppwords file : input=stoppwords_de.php”

    [Stoppwords_en.php]
    return array(‘and’,'or’,'but’, …);

    [Stoppwords_de.php]
    return array(‘und’,'oder’,'aber’, …);

    I really like to help you with that. Just drop me a line and attach the latest dev.

  29. October 16th, 2009 at 05:32 | #29

    Hi Jon,
    sorry for bothering you again but i have a question..

    The plugin is working about 2 weeks and it collects all. The Keywords and the Top 10 last queries. At Links that will be shown in the widget there’s a problem. THe last 2 days shows me there only 1 link…. today it shows me 1 link too, but different from that in the past days.. It took the old one away… but is still 1 link showing there..
    Is this normal too?

  30. October 16th, 2009 at 08:48 | #30

    @Romeo
    No this isn’t normal. There may be another plugin interacting with mine. Would you be able to email me an export of the ljlongtailseo table from your database so I can have a look? smithj@thelazysysadmin.net

    Cheers,

    Jon

  31. October 29th, 2009 at 22:37 | #31

    Hi,

    Excuse me my bad english, but I how I can do to mark a specific word to be ignored ?

  32. October 30th, 2009 at 06:22 | #32

    @Leo
    Go into the Admin Screen from LJ Longtail SEO, then in the Settings section there is an ignored words list. This list is to be comma separated. Any words that appear on this list are not registered for search. For example if

    Ignored Words = “cat, somethingelse”

    Then the search term “the cat sat on the mat” would be ignored.

    Hope that helps.

    Jon

  33. October 30th, 2009 at 10:01 | #33

    @Jon Smith
    I dont believe, I waste 20 minutes to find that place to write the ignored words !

    Thanks for use your time to help me.

  34. November 5th, 2009 at 15:02 | #34

    Greetings,
    I am trying to activate the plugin but it came up with this message:
    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /nfs/c04/h01/mnt/60279/domains/thejacoblog.com/html/wp-content/plugins/lj-longtail-seo/lj-longtail-seo.php on line 13

    using a shared host and I can manually create a db through the host admin interface. The site is thejacoblog.com

  35. November 5th, 2009 at 15:12 | #35

    @Tico
    It appears your shared host is running PHP version 4. LJ Longtail SEO is currently only supported with PHP version 5.

    Cheers,

    Jon

  36. Alberto
    November 12th, 2009 at 21:18 | #36

    Hi,
    but the plugin works without adding in the sidebar?
    because I want to first collect a list of keywords and then show in sidebar ….

    Alberto

  37. November 19th, 2009 at 08:35 | #37

    @Alberto
    Yes the plugin will collect data without the sidebar widget being added.

  1. November 23rd, 2009 at 01:14 | #1