Search filers leading to search results page

I have been playing with the various search options and am happy that if I have a SmartSearchBox on the homepage that when used it takes the user to the required Search results page that contains a SmartSearchDialog, SmartSearchFilter and SmartSearchResults web parts. All of these appear to function as I would expect. I would like to add the filter to the search button on the homepage eg: Dog, Cat, Rabbit so that the SmartSearcBox includes this filter at the point of searching. I believe I need to use a SmartSearchDialog but that doesn't redirect users to the search results page. I have reread the documentation many times and it does look like I need to be able to call the filter into the SmartSearchBox before the results are displayed. Many apologies if this doesn't make much sense.