A well placed and visible search bar is essential for your website or blog, a visitor who cant see what they are looking for is going to look for where they can search for the page or content they need, if they have to spend more than a few seconds looking for the search bar the chances are that they will lose interest and leave. Multiple this by hundreds or thousands of visitors all leaving your site and this could do serious damage to your website or business! Your search bar is also a treasure trove of user data which can be used to see what your audience is looking for on your site, this information can then be used to refine your content and keep readers engaged and staying on your site all of which result in positives from better time on site signals to Google that can improve your rankings in the SERPs.
WordPress comes with its own search function built in and it does a good job of bringing back search keyword information however its only been since the 3.7 update less than 18 months ago that ranks by relevancy were fixed and also cannot perform searches for specifics such as comments or tags.
Luckily there are many excellent alternatives out there for WordPress both paid and free, here’s a run down of 4 of the best: [Read more…] about 4 Of The Best WordPress Search Plugins