Jude, Blogging From The Ground Up Newsletter - Power Your Blog With Google Search

Just to reiterate, there are two great benefits to using Google for your site search engine:

1. It's Google! That means you have full power of the Google search on your blog.
2. You can use Adsense for your search results and make some money on your site searches. You can usually make more money with these click throughs because the ads are super well targeted.

So how do I make this happen?  Let's take a look.

1. By now I am sure you have signed up for an AdSense account, so head on over there and login. If you're not already signed up as an Adsense publisher, do it now.  Some people will tell you to do it through http://www.google.com/cse/     ignore them.
   
   
2. In your Adsense account, click on "Adsense Setup". Then click on "Adsense for Search".
   
   
3. Click the "Get Started" button. You will enter the set up wizard for creating your search form.
   
   
4. For "Search Type", select "Only sites I select". In your "Selected Sites" box, type the full URL to your blog. You can enter other sites too if you want.
   
   
5. Below enter a few keywords about your site.  This will help push more appropriate ads for your blog subjects.
   
   
6. You can leave all other fields as default. Continue to the next step.
   
   
7. Choose the look and feel of your search form. Continue to the next step.  Keeping it set to the standard form is probably your best bet.
   
   
8. Next, you can choose where you want your search results to appear.  We want this search to display its results on your blog directly and not take you back to Google, so choose "open results within my own site" and specify the URL. It should be something like "http://www.nameofmyblog.com/search-results  (we are going to create this page in a few more steps)
   
   
   
   
9. Choose the ad position and color palette that fits your blog style and look then continue to the next step.  Remember, Google ads are more likely to be clicked when they are better integrated into your site.
   
   
10. Assign a unique name to the search engine. This is for your tracking purposes. Now hit the "Submit and Get Code" button.
    
    
11. Now you will have two boxes with different snippets of code .  The first one is for the search box and the second is for the results page.
    
    
12. Open a new window and head back to your WordPress Admin.  On the left hand side click on Appearance and then Editor.  Click on the template page you want the search to show up.  If you want it on the sidebar click "sidebar.php" if its in the header click on "header.php". 
    
    
13. Copy and paste the "search box code" into your template. 
    
    
14. Now for the search results.  Create a new page with a permalink that matches the value you used above in step 8. 
    

15. Switch the page editor to HTML mode and paste in the second snippet. Now save the page.  

16. Test your page to see how the ads show up.  If it is too wide for your screen go back into the html and find this line of code: var googleSearchFrameWidth = 800;

17. Make the number something that better fits the size of your area.  Hit submit and you are done.  Be sure to test it out.

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