Letting new visitors know we provide training courses
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-02-19 07:01:22 - Graham EllisI never see the most downloaded image on my website. Well - hardly ever. Here it is:
Brash? Yes! Bright? Yes! It's an advertising link, to let people who arrive at our web site looking for technical information (and there are thousands a day) know that we can help them with training courses. But of course people don't want to be overrun with adverts so once the point has been made, more subtle links are provided on following pages.
The $_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER] variable in PHP tells all of our pages the URL of the page on which a link was clicked to bring them to our site, and for search engines, that includes the query string that they entered. A little simple analysis with regular expressions, and Robert's your father's brother (or should that be "Bob's your Uncle").
We have a series of about 10 images like these ...
... in that case displayed to people who are searching for Melksham or hotel. If you want to see them in full technicolor (I HAVE warned you!) have a look here.
We have a script which shows you the most downloaded images from our site that I wrote a few weeks ago and if you want to see the source so that you can do something like this, it's here.