How to Add a Search Engine to Your Site
by Herman Drost
Published on this site: September 22nd, 2005 - See
more articles from this month
When visitors arrive at your web site you want them to find
the information quickly otherwise they will lose patience
and move on. A great way achieve this is to add a search engine
or search box to your web site. Since most visitors are already
familiar with using search engines such as Google, they can
easily use the search feature on your site.
In this article I will discuss:
A. The benefits of adding a search engine
B. Types of search service providers
C. Where to place a search box on your site
D. How does the search engine work
A. Benefits of adding a search engine and types
of sites where it can be used.
- Ecommerce sites - your ecommerce site usually
has many different types of products so the navigation menu
is not focused enough to rapidly find the specific product
your visitor is looking for. Adding a search engine to your ecommerce site will help the visitor to easily and quickly
zoom in on the product by entering their keyword in the
search box.
- Dynamic sites - search engines have difficulty
spidering dynamically generated web pages. These are pages
often generated from a database, so the information on your
pages will not appear in the search engine's index. Add
a search engine to each page of your site. If a visitor
arrives on that page from one of the large search engines,
they can then do a quick search from that page instead of
searching elsewhere.
- Small sites - web sites that contain 5-10 pages
don't need a search engine because visitors don't have to
search through many pages to find the information. Instead,
make sure you create a simple navigation menu at the top
or side and bottom of your web pages.
B. Types of search service providers
- Atomz (www.atomz.com)
- Atomz Express Search is a free service where you can integrate
basic search capability on your personal web site or on
one of your commercial sites. It can be used on sites with
750 total pages or less and allows customization of look
and feel to match your site's design. Some third-party text
ads are shown above and below the search results. You can
use it for as long as you like for there is no trial period.
- Freefind (www.freefind.com)
- features include the ability to customize search and results
pages. The free accounts are limited to 3,000 pages or 32MB
of storage. Site search is hosted on FreeFind's server.
It generates a site map for you, tracks visitors searches and indexes password
protected pages.
- Google Free site search service (www.google.com/services/free.html)
- searches only the specific domain(s) that you list when
you create your search box. You can customize your results display to include
background, text and link colors you select. The search
box itself will reside on your web site. The search results
page will be served by Google with the customized look and feel you specify. Google may serve ads on the results
page. You can do an unlimited amount of searches. You must
display the Google logo on the web pages that contain the
search box.
C. Where to place the search engine on your site?
- Place the search box in a prominent location on your web
page...preferably top center or top right.
- Place the search box on all pages of your web site. Visitors
may enter your site from any page.
- Make the search box large enough to accommodate all search
terms the visitor would use to find the information.
- The search box should be a type-in box, not a link so
visitors don't have to wait for another page to load.
- Limit the search results to 50 per page. Visitors lose
their patience if they have to scroll through long lists
of results.
D. How does the search engine work?
It works similar to the major search engines that search
the web, however instead of crawling the web the search engine
spider will search your site. The results of the crawl are
stored in a database that resides on the search company's
server.
The company provides the necessary code to add a simple form
to your web page. This usually consists of a search box for
inserting your keywords and a send button. When you click
the button it sends the query to the search company. They
process the query to create a search results page. This shows
those pages in your site that match the visitor's query.
The quality of the search results the search engine spider
collects depends on how much information is contained in your
site. Therefore take time to correctly optimize your site
i.e. provide lots of good content that includes your keywords.
Optimize your meta tags, images and create an accessible navigation
structure.
Optimizing your site will not only provide focused results
from your internal search engine but also boost your rankings
in the major search engines.
Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster
(CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com.
Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his
"Marketing Tips" newsletter for more original articles.
mailto:[email protected].
Read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles
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