Why Adding On Site Search Helps?

Some simple facts about your potential website visitors:

• Site visitors don't have time to traverse through your site from page to page
• They scan the contents of a page rather instead of reading every word
• They want, demand, access to whatever it is they are seeking as fast as possible

Making your site easily accessible by potential visitors certainly helps with your site popularity. There is nothing more off putting than an attractive looking site makes it hard for people to find things.

Value of the On Site Search Engine

Give your visitors a clearly signposted Search box and they are more likely to stay on your site. And make sure that the search engine will cater for the multiple search terms likely to be used. Visitors who don't find the result with their first query, often don't even bother to look again.

Searchers almost never look beyond the second page of search results.

So you must make sure that your search system prioritises results in a useful way and that all the most important hits appear on the first page. Look through the most common queries in your search engine logs & set the optimal landing page for each common query.

How On Site Search Engines Work

Just like Internet-wide search systems like Google, your on site Search Engine allows searches using keywords, key phrases, and various qualifying terms, such as a "+" or "AND," to make a request that only pages which contain both search terms are indexed.

In site searches, as well as in web searches, you will see an alphabetical or "ranked" list of pages that contain the term(s) you've typed into the search box.

Typically, an on site search engine has a "robot" that examines the entire site at set intervals, such as daily or weekly. When it notices a page that has been updated, added, or altered, it adds the content of the page into the site's database.

When your visitor asks for pages that contain certain words or phrases, it conducts a search of the database. The results will normally be "ranked" using such criteria as how many times the requested words appear in the document, how close to the top of the indexed web page they appear, and how close together each instance of a keyword appears to another. This is called "proximity searching." The theory is that the more times a document includes a word, and the higher up on a results page the word appears, the more important the word or term is to the page.

The Bottom Line

Provide an on site search box and your visitors are likely to use it.

Make sure it can match searchers needs and they are likely to stay on your site.

Make it as easy as possible to use and they are more likely to bookmark your site and tell others about it.

And the absolute bottom line is that you are providing the information for a reason - you want people to visit your site, to read your musings and content or to buy your products and services!