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Search_Boxes
| Search Boxes
One of my pet peeves is webmasters which make it difficult for
me to use their site. I mean, I'm there, looking at a page and I
just cannot find what I want. I look everywhere for navigation,
and what I want to find just doesn't seem to be covered. That's
not necessarily a problem, as everything cannot be always be
handled by the navigation menus.
Okay, what's the next thing I'm going to look for? A search box,
a site map or some other, more general way to find the
information that I need. Site maps can be difficult to maintain
unless they are very general (which, in turn, makes them less
useful). Search boxes, on the other hand, require no care and
feeding at all once you've got them installed (although you
should spend some time tuning them to make them even more
useful).
If you have a site with a large amount of information or a site
which is very diverse, a search box is your best bet.
- First of all, it allows your visitors to find things that they
might not otherwise find.
- It causes visitors to go deeper into your site, to stay longer
and to look around more.
- Just as important, very little maintenance is required.
- In addition, most of the search utilities are free for small
sites.
- The pay versions are extremely inexpensive for the benefits
they provide.
- It just makes your site (no matter how large or how small)
look more professional.
Some of the unexpected side effects include:
- You make it even more likely that your visitors can wind up on
any page. This means your site navigation must be very good or
your visitors will get lost.
- Visitors will find themselves dumped onto pages on your site
which you did not intend for them to find. Under construction
pages, "spam traps" and anything else you've got. Be sure to use
metatags and the Robots.Txt file to control indexing well.
You have several options when choosing a search box for your
site.
- If you edit your site using Microsoft FrontPage, you could use
the built-in search functions. Note that the searching
facilities in FrontPage are so lame that personally I would not
recommend them to anyone.
- You could use a self-hosted script if your host allows CGI
routines. I would not recommend this method, as these routines
tend to be very server intensive. In fact, most web hosts that I
have found will not allow them to run.
- The best option is to use one of the remotely-hosted search
functions for your site.
I have found three excellent remotely-hosted search companies.
Atomz - Probably the overall best of the bunch, but also the
most expensive by far. I liked Atomz, but we switched because it
just became too costly. Atomz allows up to 500 pages to be
spidered for free, with advertisements in your results pages.
http://www.internet-tips.net/Products/atomz.htm
Freefind - Excellent service, and the one that we settled on
because it was very full functioned and inexpensive. The version
for personal or nonprofit sites is only $19 per month, a year
paid in advance. Up to 32mb of pages can be spidered for free.
http://www.freefind.com/indexc.html
Whatuseek - Another excellent service, allowing up to 1,000
pages to be spidered for free.
http://intra.whatuseek.com/index.shtml
Each of these services has it's own advantages and
disadvantages, but all of them work basically the same. My
recommendation is to try out all three services using their free
versions to determine exactly which one is the best for your
needs. Then go ahead and purchase the paid version for the
correct fit.
How does this all work? Well, once you sign you for an account
you supply the URL for your web site. You then define a template
for the results page, or you can use one of the basic templates
that each service provides. All three services allow you to
define a template (in advanced mode) which looks exactly like
your site. You then define any special parameters such as pages
to exclude, usernames and passwords for protected pages and so
on. Once that's done, you install the search code on each of
your web pages, then tell the search utility to spider your site.
It's as simple as that. I fully tested each of the three search
companies in about an eight hour day before finally settling on
the one that best met the requirements of my site.
Okay, so let's say you now have chosen a search function for
your site, you've created the perfect template and you've got
your HTML code. What else do you need to do?
- Put the search box in a very prominent spot on your site. The
upper left-hand corner is by far the most visible location, and
it's a great choice. Make sure that it is at least "above the
fold".
- Put the box on every single page.
- Always try out the product with the free version.
- Once you've settled on the search function you like, get the
paid version if you can afford it. The paid version looks more
professional because it has no advertisements.
- Use the advanced template function to make your results pages
look identical to your site.
- If the search function has synonyms (FreeFind does not appear
to have this feature), then take advantage to guide your
visitors.
- Read the reports each search function produces to find out
what people are searching for. Tune your site as appropriate.
For example, if you have a site about "asthma" and people are
searching for "breathing machines", then be sure and include a
page on breathing machines, with the appropriate metatags. This
is an excellent way to improve your site.
- Each of these search functions has ways to tune the results.
Over time, as you examine reports, use them to make your
visitors searches more accurate.
- While you are tuning for your on-site search, don't forget the
other search engines. For example, while you are fixing up a
page for your own search engine, add the appropriate metatags,
titles, descriptions and such. After a while, you may find
yourself thinking more and more like a search engine, which
means you may get a side benefit of making your site more search
engine friendly overall.
- Be careful when asking these functions to spider your site,
especially if you have a large site. You can use up a lot of
your host's resources to no good benefit unless you are careful.
It's always wise to spend the few seconds to think about what
you are doing from your hosts point of view - it can save
hassles later on.
- I like to schedule my spidering for once a week. It's often
enough to catch changes quickly, but not so often to put a huge
burden on my host.
I would also like to point out that you have a lot of control
over these search functions. Tuning your site to use one of them
well has some major side benefits:
- They all use the "description" metatag, so improving your
descriptions helps your personal search. It also helps your site
get better listings in some major search engines.
- These functions also use "keyword" metatags, which also helps
you with some of the major search engines.
- Since you can make changes to your site, spider, then test to
see the result, you get a better idea of how search results look
to people. You will almost certainly find (as I did) that the
search engine does not display what I thought it was displaying
for descriptions of pages. Some quick tuning, and my visitors
got not only better search results, but better descriptions of
the pages that were found.
- As you look at reports, you will find people are looking for
synonyms a lot, and thus not finding pages that they should. As
you improve your keyword metatags to help them out, you will
also help out your sites performance in other search engines.
Another good idea as you become more savvy is to put some of the
search terms from your reports into the major search engines to
see what comes up. If your site shows up, look at how it is
described. Then tune your site accordingly.
So as you can see, adding a search box is easy, inexpensive (or
even free), and has many benefits to both you and your visitors.
Perhaps you should check it out.
Additional Information
Free stuff Headquarters
http://www.internet-tips.net/Freestuff/Freesearch.htm Search
Utilities These services allow you to add a search box to your
site.
HTML tag reference guide -
http://www.internet-tips.net/HTML/META.htm
HTML tag reference guide -
http://www.internet-tips.net/HTML/META_name_description.htm
HTML tag reference guide -
http://www.internet-tips.net/HTML/META_name_keywords.htm
HTML tag reference guide -
http://www.internet-tips.net/HTML/META_name_robots.htm
HTML tag reference guide -
http://www.internet-tips.net/HTML/TITLE.htm
Meta-Tags http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/metatags.htm Be
sure and set up your meta-tags properly if you want to be found
by some search engines.
Use ROBOTS.TXT to control search engine indexing
http://www.internet-tips.net/Advertising/robots.htm You can use
ROBOTS.TXT to keep search engines from indexing parts of your
site
About the author:
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets
at http://www.internet-tips.net - Visit our website any time to
read over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your
internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
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