Thursday, July 29, 2010

How to optimize your website's internal search for search engines?

Some say Google consider Google analytics when indexing web pages and some says not. What ever you believe you can make use of what your customers actually search for to reach out for potential customers.
You can do this is by optimizing your website's internal search for search engines. I want you to type the following in the Google search first.

site:your search page URL goes here

If you have not blocked search engines crawling the above URL you will get some results. These results are the actual searches your customers carried out using your internal site search. Search engines do index these pages as well. What I'm concerned about here is the browser title. URL might probably contain the key words which the customers searched for and there might also be a place where it displays the searched keyword inside a H1 or H2 tag, but most web masters miss the browser title. It is a good practice to change the browser title dynamically when displaying the search results and include the searched key words in the browser title. If you got a set of similar results with the same title when you searched the above text I gave, that means your browser title requires a fix. Also keep in mind that if your internal search is programmed well this is a place where you can generate some keyword rich (high keyword density) pages.

Check list
  • Dynamic browser title
  • Display the searched keyword in H1 or H2 tags
  • Use strong tags to highlight the keywords in the search results
  • Display similar searched terms (previously searched by customers)




Hope this answered most of your questions like,
Best practices when designing a search for a website
Importance of a search tool for a website
How to use customers to reach out to potential customers?
How to use Google analytics data to optimize your site for search engines?
Which pages are the most keyword rich in a website?

No comments: