A lyrical plan
One of the less-obvious things I added to this site for its recent reboot was a random song lyric tagline on the homepage. I wanted something that was interesting and kinda cool, but that didn’t require me to expend much mental energy to come up with.
I also thought it would be pretty funny if my site started showing up in search results for random song lyrics; that, or I might even gain some new readers wondering why lines from their favourite songs were returning my site in amongst all the popup-laden lyric listings sites.
Result!
It didn’t take very long to happen; a mere three days after launch, and I am now result number one for the random lyric Round here we always stand up straight (from ‘Round Here’ on August and Everything After, Counting Crows). Pretty good going – I certainly wasn’t expecting to trump the other 3,000 sites featuring that line!
I’m also #8 for a Yahoo! search for These are the days of miracle and wonder (‘Boy in the Bubble’, Graceland, Paul Simon).
How’s it done?
I can’t take credit for anything apart from the idea, as it is made possible by a couple of existing Textpattern plugins:
dru_random_text, by Drew McLellan, picks a random line from a text file or database table; I chose to add a new table to my Textpattern database to hold all the song lyrics, so I also installed…rss_admin_db_managerby plugin guru Rob Sable, which allows me to add new lyrics to the database from my normal Textpattern admin panel, without bothering with PHPMyAdmin
To implement the page title, all I had to do was include a call to the dru_random_text plugin in the correct place on my template (while avoiding displaying it on pages of search results or category lists):
<title><txp:page_title /><txp:if_search><txp:else /><txp:if_category><txp:else /> · <txp:dru_random_text table="thewatchmakerproject_txp_lyrics" column="lyric" source="database" /></txp:if_category></txp:if_search></title>- Download this code: /code/a-lyrical-plan.txt
Over time, as Google and the other search engines re-index the site and I add more lyrics to the database, I’ll hopefully start to show up in more searches; okay, it might dilute the relevance of those results if you’re a SERPs Nazi, but it keeps me amused…
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Previously: Rebooted
Next: Unscientific poll: Do you use the <base /> element?
Comments
- Derek Featherstone
- 1590 days ago
- I’ll be curious to see how this pans out – the Google results you point to show the lyric is in the title. And, if you are changing the title every time, well… I guess i’m just curuious to see what Google things of all of this. Clearly it worked, but I’m interested to see any long term effects…
- #1
- Matthew Pennell
- 1589 days ago
- I can’t imagine that Google would have much of a problem with a site that changes its homepage title regularly – it can’t be that uncommon a scenario; look at online news outlets, they have the date in theirs.
I’ll probably forget to check next time I get spidered anyway… :D - #2
- Derek Featherstone
- 1589 days ago
- I guess I wasn’t thinking so much about the title, as I was the random phrase in the title that has nothing to do with the page, per se. Either way, we’ll see what happens.
I still like the idea… :) - #3
- Matthew Pennell
- 1589 days ago
- Oh, right – still not an uncommon scenario though, Google can’t realistically penalise sites for having irrelevant straplines, can they?
- #4
- Matthew Pennell
- 1589 days ago
- ...and PS – I couldn’t see where to purchase my box of chocolates on your site; can I get a refund from my Google search results?
;) - #5
- Derek Featherstone
- 1589 days ago
- I suppose not so uncommon… :)
I guess any of us that uses some kind of “conceptual” name for our blogs is doing the same thing – your site included. For that matter, do any of us have really accurate titles for the main page of our blog? - #6
- Matthew Pennell
- 1589 days ago
- There are probably one or two out there…
- #7
