Hello, all you rock star SEOers out there! Happy Olympics watching to you! All of us here at Search Engine Academy are rooting for our favorite sports and home country. Well, let’s take a little bit of time and talk even more about Infrastructure Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO), and specifically, search systems. We’ve been going through how to select and set up a site search function that really works for your web visitors.

Today we’re going to talk about how to group and present results. There are no perfect ways to present results, so we are going to go over some of the different ways you might display your site’s results.

One way you could show results is presenting them by a common interest or aspect. This is also known as “clustering results.”  You can develop clusters by things like metadata, document types – .pdf or .doc, for example.

Suppose you offer search results for “mens basketball shoes.” Clusters could be high tops, leather, color, size and brand. This way, your searcher sees how many different types he can search on to find the shoes he’s looking for.

Letting Your Web Visitor Export the Search Results

Your web visitor may not bookmark the specific search results page, or even the targeted page with the information he needed. You could let the visitor print, save or email the results for future reference. If you run a newspaper site, you could even offer a “reprint” option.

What if your web visitor wants to selects a set of results within results? Think about adding a shopping cart or library function for folks to store the documents and pages. In addition, think about offering them the ability to save the entire search. Sometimes the results are so relevant and compelling, the reader may not have time to look at all of them in one session, or he may have others review the results along with him.

This is going to be a very short post today, because the next item we’ll deep dive into is designing your web site’s search interface. In the meantime, think about how you’ll present results to your user, and the different ways you’ll let her hang onto those results for future reference.

Now is a good time to learn SEO in depth. Check out our locations and see if there’s a Search Engine Academy near you. We’re all offering classes monthly, so get SEO trained and certified soon.

Until next time, keep it between the ditches, OK?

All the very best to you,

Welcome back to Search Engine Academy‘s blog posts on Infrastructure Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO). While most people know and understand a little bit about SEO, many others have never heard of IA, and don’t know how the two disciplines compliment one another. We’ve been showing you in a series of IA and SEO posts going back to the beginning of 2012.

Let’s continue learning more about designing and implementing a site search function for your website. We’ll talk about the different sorting and ranking options you can incorporate into your design specifications.

Alphabet Sorting

This is a nice, general purpose way to sort out information. It’s handy for names, places, products, etc. Consider omitting words like “a” and “the.”

Chronological Sorting

What if the results need to be time-sensitive? If your site features breaking news or updates, this can be a very useful search function. In general, reverse-chronological ordering (newest to oldest dates) is used. Historical data also lends itself well to chronological sorting.

Relevance Ranking Factors To Consider

There are multiple relevance ranking algorithms to choose from. Here ae some factors to think about when determining relevancy ranking:

• The number of query terms in a retrieved document or page
• The frequency of the query term in the document
• The proximity of the query term – in teh same sentence or paragraph
• The location of the query term in the fetched document
• The popularity of the document that contains the query keywords

Relevance ranking can be quite subjective. One document may only reference some information contained in another document, but they share the same search keywords. If human editors do the document or page indexing, there’s a level of subjectivity there.

If there are multiple documents containing the phrase “women’s boat shoes,” what’s the most relevant document? The one that is a product description? Is it the page that talks about what to look for when selecting boat shoes? Or is it a document that lists the different manufacturers, and rates them?

And you could also display a relevance score for each document that is featured in search results. But how can you best determine the most accurate relevancy? It really depends on what your searchers really need from your site.

Popularity Ranking

This is how Google ranks pages they feature in SERPs. This is determined by the algorithm, which changes constantly and has a few hundred different ranking factors that are blended to determine relevancy on a curved, not an absolute scale.

If you and I have competing web sites about SEO, we are going to argue that we should be relevant. In order to be relevant, we are going to compete with every SEO factor at our disposal. But many websites don’t, and so their competition often is more popular than their own site.

User/Expert Ranking

Many social media sites allow their users to rank the information’s value. Digg is famous for this. The more ratings, the more likely that information will show up higher.

Pay For Placement

You can get high ranking pages by paying for placement in high quality directories. There are many paid directories that will put you on the first page of the specific topic area your site is related to.

Let’s wrap up this post; you have a lot to think about, if you’re seriously contemplating instituting a site search box for your web pages.

Until next time, think about how you’d rank results on your website, and if you’re just getting started in SEO, join us at Search Engine Academy for basic or advanced SEO class to learn more.

All the very best to you,

Good day, all you SEOers out there! I’m glad you’re back, reading Search Engine Academy’s continuing series on Infrastructure Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO). The two go together quite well, because IA and SEO are about finding your most relevant content as fast and as easily as possible.

We’re talking about the fourth major IA system – site search. I have covered IA site search in previous posts, so if the concept is new to you, please read those first then come on back to this one.

Today, let’s talk a little bit about presenting the search results your well-designed, very useful site search box function has served up.

There are multiple ways to present results, and you have choices to make. But here’s what you really need to think about: which content to highlight for the retrieved page or document, and how to list those results.

Displaying Content Components

Recall that with your SEO efforts, most SERPs show the title and description tag for the searcher. Well, for your internal search results, think about if your target audience wants to see more or less content describing the page.

It’s possible to let the searcher decide if she wants to see a description or just titles; this can be a search function option. But keep in mind that if your site search function spawns multiple pages, she’s going to act like she’s looking at just another search engine, so it’s unlikely she’ll go past page one. When designing your site search function, this is an important consideration to plan for.

The other thing to consider is the type of query that will yield results. What if she’s looking for names and phone numbers?  Display the phone number first.

And be sure to design your site search to show the query term or keywords within the context of the displayed search results for each document. The searcher can quickly scan the document to decide if it’s really relevant to her search needs.

How Many Search Results Should Be Displayed

This depends upon a couple things. If you design your search engine to show lots of information for each fetched page, you’ll need to have a small retrieval set, as it’s called. If you are going sparse, you can let more results be in the set. Again, you’ll need to do some testing to see what works best for your target audience.

The other thing to keep in mind is that not everyone is on high speed internet service; some folks still have to use dial-up. It’s not their fault, so you might want think about keeping the search results simple, but have an advanced search function available, in case users with better internet access want more detailed results.

You can provide a nice touch to the search results displayed if you show the total number of documents, or pages retrieved for her query. Think about providing SERPs in groups of ten, much like most search engines.

Results Listing

OK, now that you’ve designed the retrieval and the content, what order is best? What kind of information your searcher requires, along with the kind of information they need, plus how they use the results will drive this part of the design.

There are two types to choose from: sorting and ranking. You can show results by date, alphabetically, relevance or popularity.

You may wish to consider using sorting for information that helps users make a decision or do an action. Price comparison of products is a good example of sorting.

Ranking can be used if information has to be analyzed or learned. Usually ranking is done from the most relevant to least important. But, relevance is relative, and what’s important to me might not mean jack to you.

There’s a lot to think about when designing and implementing a site search box. We’ll stop at this point today, and pick up next week on different types of ranking to think about, depending upon the type of content and information your site contains.

In the meantime, why not think about how you’d display search results for your site, and how much detail you’d provide in your SERPs?

Are you looking for in-depth SEO training? Join us for a Search Engine Academy SEO training course this summer. If you have a seasonal site that’s especially for Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas, believe it or not, but now is the time to begin optimizing for the holidays!

All the very best to you,

Good day, SEOers! Search Engine Academy is back with another Wednesday posting about Infrastructure Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO). I skipped last week due to it being July 4th.

Here in the nation’s capital, Washington DC, it’s hotter than hot. Record heat, an epic and legendary storm that knocked out my power for five days, and no sailing for me, because it’s too darn hot. In the meantime, work continues on SEO and IA.

Let’s continue exploring the relationship between infrastructure architecture and search engine optimization by learning more about creating and implementing a site search box function for your website that actually works well.

You can read Part 3 of Search Systems to refresh your brain a little bit, if you like.

Now, let’s dive into figuring what content to index on our sites for the search box function. Let’s say you have an article by a subject matter expert that’s on a page by itself, because it’s that useful and important. And let’s say on that page are related links, images, videos, etc.

Figure out what all you think your users would plug into your site search function. One way to figure this out is by looking in your web analytics and seeing what is visited a lot. If the article by your subject matter expert is really relevant and important, definitely include that. Maybe the video and a couple links are also highly relevant, so be sure to include those.

You can make multiple elements on an individual web page show up in your search function. These can be:

• URL
• Link(s)
• Keywords
• Body text
• Alt text
• Description
• H1
• H2

Be sure these elements have the keyword phrase, or a synonym that your site search function will show as results.

What if this is a page that’s under-appreciated? In other words, it’s good content, very important, quite credible, etc., but people really aren’t accessing like you think they should. First, apply your SEO to the page. Then, tune up your site search box to feature this page for the relevant keywords and related concepts.

So, figure out the most important content you want featured in your site search results. Be prudent, and don’t include everything, because the results will be cluttered and possibly off-topic.

Now that you’ve done that, let’s look at search algorithms for a minute.

First, there is no perfect algorithm that will solve every site search problem. Here are the different algorithm types to consider:

Pattern Matching

This compares a search query to the text of your documents on your web site. If it matches, it’s tossed up there in the search results page.

Recall and Precision

This is great for site that are full of content for legal and scientific research, as an example. You’ll consider an algorithm that is high in recall for pulling hundreds of documents. The problem with this one is that a lot of non-relevant content will also bubble up. If you know your searchers are only looking for the top, really specific, topic-relevant articles, a precision algorithm is the way to go. Of course, it’s possible a lot of supporting content may not get indexed

So what’s a webmaster to do? You’ll probably sacrifice a little bit of both and go with something that tries to balance recall with precision. You may choose a solution that does automatic stemming – expanding a term that includes other information with the same root, or stem. Here’s an example:

Root – “comput” You could get computer, computation, computational, etc.

If you don’t include stemming, your site search could be very literal. If I type in compute, it will only bring up relevant documents that only contain “compute.”  The one good thing about this is, it’s very precise. But it may not be search-friendly for your target audience.

Something else you could do is employ “document similarity.” Strip out “stop words” such as “the,” “is,” “and.” You’ll get the best, most relevant content that accurately represents documents. In addition, you could have an algorithm that presents results with similar metadata. Sometimes on web sites you’ll see this represented as “Related Content.”

There’s also collaborative filtering and citation searching to allow more results from relevant documents.

There are other variations of search algorithms out there, but I think you get the idea. The point I want you to know is find a search algorithm that will yield the best collection of pages in search results. What you probably will need to do is test some out, using your target audience as the lab rats. What you think is good and what they really need may be a huge canyon.

Query Builders

These support search performance. They are tools that can be implemented, and here are some common ones you’ll run across:

• Spell Checkers – great for allowing misspellings, while still bringing up relevant results. Be sure to include the most common misspellings in your site search box function.

• Phonetic Tools – good for name searches; they can offer up variations of names.

• Stemming Tools – allows a searcher to type in a word and get various terms associated with the root word query.

• Natural Language Processing – these consider the “how do I” and “what is” queries to get better results.

• Controlled Vocabularies and Thesauri – these tools automatically include synonyms for the query, which is why it’s important to optimize pages with keyword phrase variants.

We’re going to end the post here. We’ll talk next about displaying search results. Until then, why not go back and review your analytics to see which pages (documents) are most visited, and what keywords are producing pages for review? Also, check your most common misspellings and see if those would be good candidates to include in your site search function.

Still learning about SEO? Get SEO trained and certified from one of our Search Engine Academy locations in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe, Malaysia and United Arab Emirates.

All the best to you,

Welcome to Search Engine Academy’s information series on Infrastructure Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO). We’re talking about the fourth major system in IA, which is the search function system. If you like, get up to speed on previous IA search system posts, then come on back to catch up with us.

For large, large websites with hundreds of pages, one of the biggest tasks before implementing site search is deciding what content your search box should accommodate. If you’ve been faithfully following IA and did the very first system – content organization – you have a great blueprint to start from.

On the other hand, if you’ve not done your content organization and inventory, you might feel like you’re shooting in the dark.

If your site serves both your clients and employees, you probably don’t want to mix the results for both. It’ll frustrate everyone if you have someone looking for system specifications and the results cough up your performance appraisal system instead.

Think about creating “search zones” – content that is similar in nature. This will help focus searches and give more narrow, tailored results. It helps if your content is tagged in some sort of manner with meta data, tags, descriptions, etc.

Figuring Out Search Zones

From the must-have book on IA, “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” search zones are “subsets of a web site that have been indexed separately from the rest of the site’s content. When a user searches a search zone, he has, through interaction with the site, already identified himself as interested in that particular information.”

For example, if you’re in the market to buy a sailboat, maybe you’ve found the mother of all sailboat sites. But there’s a broad range of sailboats you can choose from, just as if you were buying a car or a house.

But let’s say this site did it right and created search zones. For the sailboat shopper, some of those search zones could look like these categories:

Cruising

• 20 – 30′
• 30 – 40′
• 40 – 50′
• 50 – 60′
• Over 60′

Racing

• Dinghies
• One Design
• Monohulls
• Catamarans

Furthermore, they could be broken down by manufacturer as well. The point is, you can start with some high level search areas or zones, then based on your analytics, you can develop specific search zones to help that potential sailor get closer – in a faster manner – to her dream boat.

Some other ways you can create search zones are based on:

• Type of Audience
• Location
• Business Vertical
• Equipment Type
• System Type
• Gender
• Age

And so on and so forth.

While creating multiple search zones can be helpful, they can also be a hindrance, because they are naturally going to get complicated with more layering. You may have to experiment with different levels to see what works best for your site.

Navigation and Destination

You’re probably familiar with the two major web page types: navigation and destination. Navigation pages are there to help your web reader get to her final destination, so navigation pages may have main information, search and browsing pages to accomplish destination arrival.

Destination pages have the actual information or content she is looking for: technical specifications, product information, prices, sizes, scores, etc. So, when developing your site search function, concentrate on destination pages to keep the search function leaner and faster.

Going back to our sailboat example, if I’m looking for a West Wight Potter P19 sailboat, I don’t want to see results for the home page, the company information page or the company contact page. I want to see if a WWP fits my sailing needs. Nor do I need to be bogged down at that point with safety equipment, trailering accessories or women’s boat shoes.

The problem with this strategy is that it’s basically an ‘exact organization’ scheme, which is very limiting.

You may wish to create search zones for specific audience needs. Suppose you run a plumbing and heating parts warehouse. You may have the casual consumer and the professional contractor, as well as other suppliers. Consider mapping out your search zones for these target markets to make sure they have a better, more accurate site search experience.

Topic Index

Maybe it makes sense to develop topical search zones on your site. What if you run a large pet care/pet product site? Topics could include:

Canine:

• Food
• Leashes
• Collars
• Training Aids
• Toys

Feline:

• Food
• Litter Boxes
• Cat Litter
• Toys
• Cat Carriers

Bird:

• Cages
• Food

These obviously make sense, and are tried and true. If you see a great search scheme on a competitor’s site, don’t be afraid to try it yourself.

Should you index your content from most recent to oldest? It’s very common and is easy to set up. If you have a news site, this is probably the most useful and effective site search functionality for your readers.

We have a lot more to cover in future posts, so I’m going to stop here today. But before I go, what’s the tie-in with SEO? Well, you can use your analytics to see what keywords are linked to which pages. That’s a useful mapping exercise to create a search zone for very specific destination or product pages.

Take a look at entrance and exit paths, as well as any custom funnels you’ve set up. Are there a lot of deviations from your funnels, and if people aren’t leaving your site, which pages are they visiting most often?

Until next time, why not start thinking about some of the ways you can create meaningful search zones on your web site? It may surprise you, what you come up with.

Want to learn more about how to do your own SEO? Take a search engine optimization training and certification class with us at one of our world-wide locations.

All the best to you,

Good day to all SEOers out there! We’re doing a Wednesday blog post on Infrastructure Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO) every week to bring you helpful information and tips on how you can incorporate IA and SEO together to make the best web site/experience possible for your target audience.

Why do IA?

Because it’s all about getting your most important content found as quickly and easily as possible by anyone who uses your site. We’re going over the last of the four major IA systems – search. We previously talked about content organization, labeling and navigation systems. This is the second of who knows how many posts on search systems in IA, and you can read the first IA search system post now, then join us back here.

OK, moving right along… by reviewing your log files or analytic data, you can discover what people are looking for on your website through the keywords section. You can also ask what people want from your site via surveys, conversations, etc. If someone tells you “I came to your site searching for…” please capture that thought, because knowing what the search queries and parameters are will help you create a very useful site search function.

One really important reason why you may want to make a good site search system is because people get tired of browsing very fast. Information overload is a threat, and most people don’t want to work hard to find what they need. You should do the heavy lifting on the back end to make your site easy for the target reader to use. If you have a very dynamic site, search is going to be mandatory.  Suppose you run an online newspaper. Sooner or later somebody’s going to need to do a search on your newspaper site.

What you are actually creating is a search engine within your website with a site search function. It’s going to have an algorithm; it’s going to index all the content on your site. So, you want to apply SEO to all of your pages and make sure your techs develop a search engine based on your SEO efforts. Searches of any kind aren’t straightforward, and you’re going to have to put a lot of thought into advanced queries, Boolean operators and all sorts of other goodies to make a nice site search function for your web visitor.

Take a look at this graphic from the best book on IA, “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web:”

This is the basic outline or structure of a search system from “In Defense of Search,” Semantic Studios,  http://www.semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/search.html)

So…who’s going to develop, test and implement this search function? You? The IT staff? Outside help?

Probably a combination of the disciplines listed above, plus others you may think can contribute positively to the end product. You – the IA/SEOer – should be running this show, because it’s ultimately about searcher’s needs. Yes, the technical and coding bits are critical, but they need to be built based on the requirements you’ve gathered for what searchers need to fulfill their queries. Naturally, politics is going to rear its’ head, but you must be ready to defend your turf. Otherwise, a technically beautiful but somewhat useless function could end up being built and implemented.

We’re going to pause it here for this week’s post, but I hope you’ve picked up something, or at least are now pondering if a site search box could help your web pages. Until next time, look at your site and think it over!

And if you’re ready to learn in-depth SEO and apply it right away, Search Engine Academy has classes all over the world to teach you the most up to date SEO processes, skills and knowledge.

All the best to you,

 

Welcome to Search Engine Academy‘s ongoing series about how Infrastructure Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO) integrate to make your website content easier to find from a user’s point of view and in search engine results pages (SERPs).

We’ve been showing you the four major systems in IA over the last few months. They are:

• Organization system – categorize information by subject, chronology, etc. Can use keyword phrases (KWP) to assist – one high level, generic keyword term can be an “umbrella” phrase on a navigation or landing page, which is linked to interior pages that have more specific, long-tail keyword terms or synonyms.

• Labeling system – the ways information is represented by various link locations on each page. Leverage the power of KWPs and synonyms for better search results.

• Navigation system – how users browse or move through the content on your site – can use keyword phrases as text links to move prospects to specific pages.

• Search system – how users can search for information on your site via search boxes – be sure web page elements and content is optimized with a specific keyword phrase.

We’ve gone through the organization,  labeling and navigation systems with earlier posts. Now we’re going to start exploring the last major IA system – search systems for your web site.

The first thing to consider with the IA search is this – do you even need a site search box?

Naturally, you want your web readers to be able to find your content quickly and easily. The smaller your site is, the easier this goal is to accomplish. Hell, anyone can find something pretty fast on a ten-page website.

But what about if you’ve diligently followed the large search engine webmaster guidelines and recommendations by adding more new content on more pages?

Is your site set up more like a library?

Before we go any further, let’s make sure of one important thing.

Do not, please, under any circumstances use a site search box function to replace a deficient website navigation system.

Pretty please, OK? OK. Thanks – I just had to put that out there. Go fix your crappy navigation schemes before deciding to complicate your already-complicated website with a search function.

The great thing about IA is that if you put effort into developing the first three systems – content organization, labeling and navigation – you may not need to invest in resources, time and energy to do a proper site search box. As attorneys love to say “It depends!”

But assuming you’ve done your job properly with IA, and you still need to create and implement a search function, then realize that a strong navigation system will really support your site search system. Keep that in mind.

Have you ever used a web site’s search box function and thought the results were a total disaster? Many people feel that way. It’s because the upfront effort required to make a really useful site search wasn’t ever done. We’re going to go over how to make a great, useful site search box, so stay tuned.

The worst offenders in my own personal on-site search experience are the U.S. government websites. They are positively useless. So…if you’ve been frustrated by your own experiences, remember them as you develop your website search system, OK?

One alternative that’s easier to create, install and maintain is a site index. Ponder the pros and cons of each method and make your decision after reading Search Engine Academy’s information on making good site search box systems. Because it’s a lot of work – you’ll see!

One other thing to consider at this point – do you even know if your web visitors will use your site search box? Do a poll or survey, or simply ask them. If the majority say no, that should make the decision for you.

Since many websites are not planned, but grow as needed (pages and content added, plus maybe functionality), it’s easy for them to show up as a confused state of jumbled information. Adding a search system can really help your readers when there’s too much information to browse, but that begs the question – how much information or content is too much to browse?

Alas, there’s no standard answer to that one. You’ll have to go by visitor feedback, gut feeling, etc.

If your site has been developed for years by multiple people with little or no guidance on standardization, and meta data is non-existent, a site search function will help, but it’s not a cure.

What’s a good starting point for determining how to develop a site search box function?

We’ll explore that and more next week. Until then, think about if your site is large enough to warrant a search function, and if so, keep an open mind on how to make it work right.

And don’t forget…Search Engine Academy has two, three and five day SEO training and certification courses with the most up to date knowledge to make you a better SEOer for higher search engine results.

All the best to you,

Hello, and welcome to Infrastructure Architecture Wednesday. I missed posting last week due to being overcome by events, or OBE as I call it. Every Wednesday, I give you some information about Infrastructure Architecture (IA) and how it relates to search engine optimization (SEO).

For the last several posts, I’ve talked about IA  navigation systems for websites and pages. We’re continuing to look at the different navigation systems within IA.

Within IA, navigation systems answer the questions:Where am I?

• What’s close by?
• Where can I go from here?

We’re talking about navigating through a website, so these are valid questions to ask and answer within the site.

We’ve gone through global and local navigation systems in previous posts. Let’s turn to some advanced navigation sub-systems, and how they might help you make a better web visit experience for your target market.

Personalized Navigation

This is where your site gives the web visitor tailored pages, based on her behavior, needs or preferences. You’re really kind of guessing what she needs, and you have maybe a 50-50 chance of getting it right. On the other hand…

Customized Navigation

Customized navigation allows the user to have direct control over content and navigation. She tells us what she wants, and our site delivers for her.

While these are great, they are not a cure-all for website navigation. They can support your navigation system. They are hard to do right, and they require a lot of up-front work.

Personalized navigation can include the searcher entering data such as age, income level, gender, location, etc. to bring up products that she may be looking for. A good example of personlized navigation is Amazon. It recommends things to us based on our history of browsing, searching and buying. Sometimes Amazon falls short, but hey, it’s trying.

Some examples of customized navigation web sites are My Yahoo! and MySpace. The drawback of customization is that the user has to put some time, energy and effort into this customization to get what she wants. Most folks don’t want to do that.

And guess what? We don’t always know what we don’t know, so this method still isn’t the perfect answer. Our search needs change constantly.

Social Navigation

This could work well; it’s still being refined. An example of social navigation is the New York Times Most Popular. Actually, many large sites with multiple articles and blog posts are now doing this to draw more visitors deeper into their sites. Amazon also does this with collaborative filtering.

Tag clouds are another form of social navigation.

And there you have it. We are done exploring the different navigation systems for web sites. I hope this series has been helpful.

Next, we’re going to dive into search systems, and I can promise you we’ll go over the why and how of search systems within IA, and how they can help your SEO efforts.

Until next week, continue to look for ways to optimize your site, and if you’d like to learn SEO in several days, Search Engine Academy can teach you to apply the processes and techniques to get better web search results.

All the best,