Start.
Hello everyone! So how are your blogs going? I’d love to see one of yours, so please do drop me a line and i’ll visit them. We might even do a link exchange.
In this 2-part entry, we are going to add a useful tool for your blog. A search engine. Your wordpress has a built-in search engine. However, in this tutorial we are going to use Google’s custom search engine. That way we can potentially earn money while using the most widely-used search engine. To start, if you haven’t already, register an account with Google Custom Search . Registration and setup should be easy as Google makes it quite user-friendly. After registration, click Create a Custom Search Engine. Fill in the boxes to your liking. Feel free to customize yours depending on your site/blog content. You can also specify certain sites that you’d like to be emphasized when displaying search results (you can add your own site here); also choose the free edition (Standard), unless you want the paid service. Submit.
On the next page, assuming there are no errors, you should get a congratulatory message telling that you have successfully created the search engine. Nothing much to do here. Click Finish.
On the next page, click on control panel.
In the Control Panel, you can edit your initial the settings as well as change other options, in particular – make money. Also, we are going to add a Subscribed Link. More on this later.
Now for Making Money, click on Make Money. For this step, you NEED to have an adsense account, register for an account now, if you haven’t already. In the next page, you will be given the option to register for an adsense account or to associate one, if you have an account already. After everything is done with adsense, go back to your control panel, we are going to add a Subscribed Link. Under Preferences, make sure that the option to display ads is chosen. Check the checkbox at the bottom. Then click on Save Changes.
After saving, click on the “Google Subscribed Links” link. On the next page Click on “Create a Subscribed Link.”
Then choose the first option- Design a Basic Subscribed Link. You can check the other advanced options; feel free to share with us your experience with them.
Before we proceed, let me give you an overview of what subscribed links do. Basically, it lets you display a custom search result depending on what the users used as their search term. For example, if you a user used ‘apple’ as a search term, you can create a subscribed link that will display any link that you fancy each time a user uses ‘apple’ in their search term. Pretty neat, eh? ou can test it out in my site by entering “create blog” on my search form, it is on the right side. By the way, this is what I have setup.
Of course, you can have this customized depending on your preferences, you can also specify outside links. You can add additional keywords as well; use a comma to separate the keywords. Click on Next.
Congratulations! You have just added your subscribed link to your custom search engine. On the next page, you are going to see a set of buttons that you can put on your site. You DO NOT have to place those buttons in your site in order for your subscribed links to work. They are there if you want your users to subscribe to your subscribed link – subscribing means that if they use ANY Google search engine (even outside of your site), your subscribed links will also appear in their search results. If you want that to be available for your readers, then feel free to add that button to your site. But for our purposes, you don’t need to add that button for the subscribed link to work on your site. Click Finish once you’re done.
Go back to your Control Panel, and click on Look and Feel. We are now going to customize the look and feel of your search engine. Choose your preferred search box.
You can also customize the colors of your search results. Be a bit creative here and make sure that your chosen colors matches or blends the look and feel of your site. These are my settings.
After you’re satisfied, click on save changes. After saving, click on Code. And choose the default settings. You can also specify where ads will appear.
Choose your preference. Just below that, you’re going to see two (2) code snippets. One is for your search box, and the other is for your search results. We are going to need those pieces of code in part 2 .
This concludes the first part of this tutorial. On the second part , we are going to piece them all together and place them on your blog.
Till then!
End.