Adding Functionality to Your Website – Search
September 28, 2006 by Lara Kulpa
Filed under Web Design
Does your site have a search function?
How do your visitors quickly figure out if you have what they want?
All the marketing in the world means squat if you don’t live up to the hype when visitors click your link. You’d be surprised at how much something so “trivial” like a search feature can mean to your site’s visitors. (And to your pockets!)
Google offers a search function via their adsense program. If you use Google ads as a form of revenue, you can easily add a search box that crawls the web AND your website, and produces the results on a page that you customize to match your website’s color scheme and logo. You can customize the search form itself to match your site, and you can add up to three URLs to the search, where your visitors can choose either the “web”, “site A”, “site B”, or “site C” to do their searching. When a visitor clicks on a link after using the “web” search, you will receive adsense revenue in your account. (No revenue is received when a visitor searches your site, however the default setting on the search box is set to search the web and it’s paid link results.)
If you’re not interested in Google or ad revenue, there are many other free search forms available. Freefind and Atomz are just two of them.
Where do I put my search box?
Your best bet is probably either in the top right or top center of your site, in a prominent location, and on ALL pages of your site. Visitors may enter your site from any one of your pages, and if they don’t find immediately what they’re looking for, they will be looking for either a search function or a way out (which means leaving your site within about 10 seconds… you don’t want that!)
Also, make sure it’s a text box, where users can type in what they’re looking for and then hit a button that does the search. Don’t make them click on another page to get to their search box, and then yet another to get their results, and limit the results to no more than 30 or 40 per page… slow loading results pages are a no-no.
To get targeted results…
Make sure your pages are optimized well for their content. If you title your pages “Page 1, Page 2″ – the search box won’t produce the best results for your site. If you title a page “Buy Widgets” – make sure the page is about buying widgets, so when the user enters “buy widgets” into the search box, your page will show up properly.
Use a clean, easy-to-follow navigational structure, and have a sitemap somewhere on your site using the descriptive page titles and descriptions.
Provide loads of relevant content, using keywords (but not OVERusing them), and you should find that your site visitors spend more time on your site than they did before… part in thanks to your handy-dandy search feature.
Two disadvantages of using Index Server are that it doesn’t have built-in support for indexing dynamic content, and it can index only the contents of one machine—if your Web site includes Web servers with different content, you can’t use Index Server to implement a global search facility.
That’s a really good point, Alex – Although I’m not sure how many sites I’ve worked on over the past 10 years or so that use more than one web server or database to display content.
I understand if you’re talking in terms of news feeds, or things like that – but most clients of mine aren’t necessarily worried about their visitors having to search other people’s stuff on their site. They provide news feeds and such as a resource, not as the main content.
*Note to self: Discuss feedstealers and such versus true content.
I dont know but why i don find such informative and profitable blogs so often, I suspect blogging world is becoming so small that we cant find such lucrative blogs like this one.