Stop Losing Readers to Search with Lijit

No site owner wants to lose their reader’s to search.  In an ideal world every site owner would be able to include every piece of content their reader’s want to see right on their pages.  Unfortunately it is impossible to know everything your viewers want to see and therefore you have to rely on additional tools to solve this problem.

Enter Lijit.  In a nutshell Lijit lets you offer a world class search solution for your blog that you can make money from, but also control the pieces of content that surface in the results.  Imagine being able to pool together your favorite blogs from around the web and have only those results come up when a visitor uses the search on your site?  Instead of the visitor vanishing into Google you can keep them within your “trusted” network and profit from it.

Setting up an account with Lijit is easy. You create an account, plug in any additional sites you want to show up in your preferred results and you are given a bit of html to put on your blog.  Once placed you now have a full search engine for your site, that not only makes you money, but provides a level of interactivity that is unparalleled.  Yes you heard me right a FULL search engine.  Your users are able to search for specific articles, Flickr Photos, Blog comments, etc.  You name it, it shows up in the results, but Lijit didn’t stop there.  They included so many different features that I decided making a list of our favorites would make things a little easier to digest.

Our 5 Favorite Features of Lijit:

1. Search Results Load On Top of Your Site – Lijit search results overlay on top of your site meaning your viewers arent leaving.
2. Native Support for Flickr and YouTube – If one of the results includes a YouTube video or a Flickr photo, the item can be viewed right inside the search results page rather than having your user leave to another site.
3. Directly Hooks Into Your Social Stream – When you register Lijit makes it really easy to include your Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg and other social sites information into search results just by putting in your user name.
4. Metrics – Lijit makes it easy to see what the most popular searches on your site were, where they are from and even what your top posts were in terms of number of clicks
5. Make Some Money – Running a website takes a lot of work so why shouldn’t you get paid for it?  With every search performed with Lijit you can make yourself some money.

So how much do we love Lijit?  Enough to say today we are making it our default search provider for our blog starting today.  We’ve configured it to not only search the Apture blog, but also our Help pages and hope to add some of our great community members as well.  Send us over a link and we’ll get your site included into our search feed.

Hats off to Lijit for including so many unique features for Bloggers and Publishers with this product.  From installation to everyday use the product is simply fantastic.