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/METAnamedescription.htm

HTML tag reference guide -
http://www.internet-tips.net/HTML/METAnamekeywords.htm

HTML tag reference guide -
http://www.internet-tips.net/HTML/METAnamerobots.htm

HTML tag reference guide -