You can create your own Google Custom Search – or participate in a search with other teacher bloggers to grow your teacher seller business! It’s really easy to collaborate with others when you have a group custom search engine to cross-promote on the fly!
If I say CSE are you wondering what foreign language I am speaking? Don’t worry – I’m constantly learning new things and I’ve been blogging and creating products online for over 7 years now!
CSE stands for Custom Search Engine. As you most likely know, a search engine is simply a site where you can put in a search term and it spits back out results for you to click through to explore more about your search term. The most popular search engine is Google, of course.
In addition to websites, you can also look for images on your search engine results, which can come in handy for some of the ideas I have listed below too.As we all know, the algorithm for search engines is a secret and no one knows exactly how the search results are created, but we do know a few things help:
- keywords within your title, URL, and within the body of the content
- images named accordingly
- answering questions that others might have about your topic
- links to and from other bloggers
- lots of social shares on the post
- page speed
- some also believe sites that are https enabled are getting preferential treatment in the search page results
While most of us understand how to use Google to search for topics, maybe you didn’t know that you can create a custom search option for just your own website – or a collaborative search engine – which will only return results back from those sites you specify!
It really comes in handy if you want to keep people on your own website. Or if you are working with other bloggers and want to look for great content to share out that belongs only to them!
How to use google custom search on my website?
You can make your own Google CSE HERE.
Simply add in your own website to the “Sites to Search” component.
Then, you click the “Get Code” button to get the coding to add to your own website text widget (or install it on a page or post).
Save and then test it out! It really helps if you don’t have an internal search module on your website so that readers who are looking for something specific can easily search your site. All the results shown (minus the ads at the top) will be solely from your own website. Score!
How to customize your Google Search Bar?
After you have created your own Google search bar, you can even customize it further by choosing the layout of your search page, themes, change the fonts and headings, and whether or not thumbnails are shown in the results.
You can also choose whether images are returned in your CSE. Personally, my vote is that if you are using it as an internal search engine just for your own site for your readers, there is really no need to have a separate image search return results. Your readers won’t typically be searching for images.
But, if you are working with a group of other bloggers to pool resources to share, having images show up on a separate search page comes in handy because those images can easily be shared across social media or in roundup blog posts.
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