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Congratulations! You’ve Gotten Visitors to
your Site! Now, can they find what they're
looking for?
by: Robin Nobles
As search
engine marketers, we spend an enormous
amount of time trying to get targeted
traffic to our site. But, once those
visitors get to our site, can they find what
they're looking for? If not, guess what?
We've lost a customer.
Think about it
this way. How many times have you found a
site through a major search engine or
directory, only to visit the site and not be
able to find what you're looking for
anywhere on the site? What do you do next?
You go back to the search engine and click
on the next site. That site has lost a
customer: you.
Helping your
visitors find what they're looking for on
your site can cover a great many areas, such
as navigation, user interface issues, and
the lack of a clear "call to action."
But one way
around many of those issues is to offer an
onsite search engine, so that once visitors
hit your site, they can easily find exactly
what they're looking for.
The really
neat thing about onsite search engines is
that many of them are FREE. Yes, you read
right: free. Of course, that also means that
you may have ads in your search results,
which may or may not present problems for
you. However, even if you choose to purchase
an onsite engine, the cost is generally not
expensive.
What should
you look for in an onsite search engine?
-
Good
customer support. If you begin to have
problems with the engine, you want to be
able to get help in fixing it.
-
Reports that
let you know what people are searching for
once they reach your site. Just think of
the GOLD this will tell you! If you don't
have a page that covers a particular
topic, make one!
-
Ease in
setting up the engine. This may or may not
be an issue to you, but if you're like me,
you want something that is simple to set
up and maintain.
-
An extensive
"help" section at the site that will walk
you through setting up the engine and
answer any questions you might have.
-
The ability
to keep the engine out of certain areas of
your site that you don't want spidered and
available through the search, such as
employee areas, password-protected member
areas, etc.
-
The ability
to spider password-protected areas so that
your member areas can have their own
onsite search.
-
The ability
to customize search results pages.
-
The
capability to request re-indexing whenever
you update the site, or even to schedule
re-indexing on a regular basis.
In my training
material and resource library at the
Academy, I had an onsite search engine for a
long time. Then, the company folded. Until
recently, I hadn't set up another onsite
engine, because the one onsite engine that I
really wanted to use didn't index
password-protected areas. So, I "patiently"
waited for the onsite engine, FreeFind, to
add this to their list of features. When
they recently did, I jumped on it, and now
both of my online training programs have
excellent onsite search engines through
FreeFind (http://www.freefind.com).
But why did
FreeFind stand out among the others, and why
was it so important to me to wait until they
could index password- protected areas?
FreeFind offers some features that I
couldn't find on other onsite search
engines, features that would help me
tremendously with my work.
For example:
-
FreeFind
will automatically create a What's New
page, after you've any changes to the
site. Just think of how much help that
will be for me with my training material?
Between my two programs (beginning and
advanced), I have over 1000 resource pages
to update every single month, and I've
been creating the "What's New" page by
hand. Now, it's automatically created for
me.
-
FreeFind is
the only onsite search engine that enables
your visitors to find the page they're
looking for, then keeps an eye on it for
any changes. Their ChangeDetection (tm)
monitoring system lets your users monitor
a page for content changes, then notifies
them when the page is changed. If you set
up this engine on your own site, it will
build traffic by turning casual, one- time
visitors into repeat and loyal visitors
who return again and again to look at
changes made to the page that are of
particular interest to them.
-
FreeFind
will automatically create a Site Map of
your site. This Site Map is an
alphabetical listing of the pages on your
site. The Site Map will be even more
valuable to you if you have a regular,
non-password protected site, because it
will give the Web search engines a page of
links to spider.
-
FreeFind
will search across several domains. So, if
your company has numerous domains, your
onsite search engine will cover each of
those domains, without having to set up
separate engines.
In Conclusion
Look closely
at your site. Is it time to add an onsite
search engine? Is it time to make sure
visitors can find exactly what they're
looking for when they land on your site? Are
you losing customers who get lost and can't
find what they want?
FreeFind
(http://www.freefind.com) is an excellent
onsite search engine that met my exact
needs. However, to be fair, and because this
article isn't meant to be an advertisement
for FreeFind, here are some other onsite
engines that you may want to consider. Look
closely at their features, and find the one
that works best for you.
About The Author
Robin Nobles, Director of
Training, Academy of Web Specialists,
has trained several thousand people in
her online search engine marketing (,a
href="http://www.academywebspecialists.com"
target=new>http://www.academywebspecialists.com)
training programs. Visit the Academy's
training site to learn more about their
online search engine marketing training
(http://www.onlinewebtraining.com)
and search engine optimization (http://www.se-optimizer.com)
software. She also teaches 3-day
hands-on search engine marketing
workshops in locations across the globe
with Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).
Email:
RobinN@acws.com |
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