Today’s websites are more complex than ever before. Many contain a wealth of information visitors can use to answer their questions and learn what they need to know before contacting a company or making a purchase online.

But with all the information and features packed into many of today’s websites, it can also be more difficult for site visitors to first of all determine whether or not a website will contain the information they need and then find it on the website. Installing a site search box can provide several advantages to help your site visitors - and also benefit your marketing function in the process.

Site Search Satisfies the Customer’s “I Want It Now” Attitude

Installing an internal site search box can help visitors find what they need more quickly. With web users still looking to find what they need as fast as possible, confusing navigation and cluttered design are more likely than ever to prompt an “on-to-the-next-site” response.

Internal site search is undoubtedly the quickest way for someone to find what they’re looking for on a large and complex site. An internal site search helps visitors get around navigational structures that may be confusing to them. This is especially important for sites that are constantly adding new content. As the site continues to grow, many users will find the site search function to be a valuable tool in helping them find what they need.

Site Search Makes a Website More Customer Centric

Installing an internal site search also means you can transform your website from a static “one size fits all” style to a more “customer-centric” approach. More and more, websites need to simultaneously cater to different types of website users - knowledge seekers, prospects, buyers and long-term customers. Internal site search helps you do this, as it helps those seeking knowledge find and assess your resources more easily.

Site Search Appeals to the “Searcher” Type of Site Visitor

Different people prefer different types of navigation tools. For example, if someone uses a search engine like Google to arrive at your website, they are more likely to prefer the same search method for finding information within your website. It’s not uncommon for site visitors to look immediately for the site search box when they arrive at a website.

Site Search Arms Marketers With Data

Marketers can benefit tremendously from installing an internal site search function. With the right analytic tool, internal site search can provide a wealth of information about who visits your site and how they navigate around it.

Site search data can provide insight into customer desires, intent, and behavior. While a customer might tell a different story if asked for feedback in a focus group or online survey, for example, site search data can reveal exactly which pages they looked for and found, which searches intrigued them to continue reading as well as those that prompted them to leave the site. This will contribute to the conversation when analyzing conversion rate performance across content and site sections.

Site Search Provides Insight into Personas and Usability Issues

Site search can provide usability data without the expense of setting up testing facilities. When the usage data and click path from real users is saved and available for viewing and analysis anytime, a marketer can see where searchers encountered difficulty. Looking at this data across multiple users can give clues to areas of the site that require updating and expansion, for example.

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Adding typical searched on phrases to flesh out descriptions of the various personas using your site can also help enrich the entire web team’s understanding of the types of people using the site. This information will be particularly helpful to any copywriters who are preparing content for selling pages and product descriptions, etc.

Site Search Brings Ideas for New Products

Users’ searches can even inspire new product offerings. If you see that many visitors are searching your site for a particular type of product or service that you don’t yet provide, it may be time to consider developing an offering to serve that underserved need. Especially if your site is already bringing traffic for those particular searches, your company may do well to act on this informal market research.

Site Search Reveals New Keywords

You may end up finding new keywords you weren’t aware of, allowing you the chance to tweak your content so more users will find the information they need on your site. Perhaps some of your pages that you feel are relevant to a specific topic are missing a few of the terms people are actually searching on. In that case, you’ll have the option to add them as appropriate and further refine your content, making it even more targeted to your users.

In addition, those keywords can be added to your search marketing campaigns, perhaps offering a chance to reach a wider audience on the Internet than originally anticipated. In order for your company to remain competitive online, you need to be open to the new ways people are finding and disseminating information. Site search is an exciting utility for websites looking to evolve their websites according to user demands.

Editor’s Note: So, if you want to add search to your website, what are your options? There are a number of free and commercial solutions available on the Web but below are several of the former:

Services:
Atomz
PicoSearch
FusionBot
Google Custom Search

Scripts/Software:
Perlfect Search
WebDevelopersNotes.com - Provides 2 pages of site search solutions.
Resource Index - Numerous Perl and PHP search scripts can be found here for DIY webmasters.

About The Author
SEO Advantage is a search engine optimization company that helps businesses harness the revenue generation potential of their websites. Find us referenced in books such as Writing Web-Based Advertising Copy to Get the Sale and the BusinessWeek bestseller The New Rules of Marketing & PR. Visit www.seo-advantage.com today for more information.

Refusing to sit still long enough for anyone to catch up, Google has rolled out another Labs experiment to the public. Google Social Search Beta launched last October, hard on the heels of Personalized Search. But this week, Google graduated Social Search out of Labs and into the public sphere.

What Is Google Social Search?

As we become increasingly connected online, we start to build around ourselves a community of people that we have regular contact with and websites where we spend much of our time. This is called our social network. Now Google has worked out a way to measure and leverage these individual social networks so they influence the search results we see. Those results therefore become more relevant to us and more influential over time.

Google determines your social network based on the connections found in your public Google profile. Connections are classed as either direct connections or secondary connections. Your Gmail chat buddies and contacts are direct connections, as are connections from links listed in your Google profile (e.g. people you follow on Twitter, LinkedIn or FriendFeed ). Secondary connections are those publicly associated with your direct connections (e.g. the people that your friends follow on Twitter).

To see your social profile on Google, login to your Google account and visit the social dashboard. The first time you do this, Google will collect all the social data it has stored about you, based on your Google Profile and public content, and build what they call your *social circle*.

After Google builds your social circle, whenever Google’s algorithm determines that your search experience will be improved, it annotates regular web index data with social data customized from your social circle and adds this information to the bottom of your search results.

You MUST be signed in to Google to see this. If you’re not happy with the results, say from Twitter, you can delete your Twitter account from your Google profile to prevent published info from your Twitter connections being added to your social circle.

You can also add or block Google contacts so you don’t see information from them in your social circle. In the reverse, you can choose what content you want to make public, based on your published Google profile.

How Does Social Search Work?

Google Social Search has been in experimental mode since October, but this week it’s been rolled out to full public Beta, meaning you should now see social content in your search results on Google.com. Google hasn’t rolled Social Search out to their regional sites at this stage, but this is expected soon.

To see social search results in action, login to your Google account, then run a search. You’ll see the heading *Results from people in your social circle* towards the bottom of the search results page. For example, if I run a search for *music blogs* on Google.com, I get the following social circle suggestions:

Because Matt Burgess and Tim Burrowes are in my social circle and have blogged about music, I see their content at the top of my social circle results.

If you want to see more social results, click on the *Show Options* link at the top left of the page and click on the *Social* link in the side menu under *All Results*. This will bring up search results sourced entirely from your social network. You’ll also see a list of your friends and connections under the menu heading *All People*. You can click on a particular name in the list to bring up more results from their public content.

Next to your social circle results are two links that are new additions to the service added to coincide with the public rollout: my social circle and my social content (pictured). These take you to your social circle dashboard that I linked to earlier.

The *my social circle* tab displays your extended network of online contacts, as well as the pathways that connect you. Clicking on the *my social content* tab brings up your public social media profiles, taken from your Google profile, that might appear in other people’s social results (pictured).

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Apart from this social dashboard, the other major difference between the original Social Search experiment and the new public rollout is the addition of Google Images into the mix. If anyone in your social circle has shared images on Flickr or Picasa and Google determines they are relevant to your search query, you may see these in your search results as well.

Judging by my social search experiments to date, I believe Google has been collating social results for some time. A key observation is that relevance seems to win over freshness in the social influenced search results - some of the top results in my social circle were from 2008.

How Do You Take Advantage of Social Search?

1. If you haven’t already done so, create a Gmail account and create and flesh out your Google Profile immediately.

2. Join more social sites if you want your content to appear in the SERPs of your direct and secondary social circle networks, particularly the primary ones Twitter, Flickr and FriendFeed.

3. Optimize your social media content (tweets, FB and LinkedIn status updates, blog feeds, etc.) for target keywords to ensure your social content is shown in a wider number of social circle SERPs.

4. Gmail and Chat contacts get top billing in your social circle so choose your Gmail buddies wisely or drop them from your profile altogether.

5. Consider the type of social content that is popular and most often shared within your networks. Concentrate on building similar content in your public social media profiles to ensure it gets syndicated via your social circle.

6. If Universal Search wasn’t enough of a punch in the gut to convince you to optimize your multimedia content, consider Social Search to be that punch placed a little lower. Your shared photos just became another content channel.

7. Become more picky about who you follow and what social feeds you subscribe to. They have just become influencers in your every day search results.

What if I Don’t Like It?

If your particular social circle seems a little lightweight or top heavy, you can control what results you do and don’t see under your social search results. You can choose to either delete a social network from your Google profile (such as Twitter or Facebook), or drop a specific contact from your network.

You can ignore the social results at the bottom of the page when signed in, or if you don’t wish to see any social search results at all, simply conduct your searches while signed out of your Google account.

About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

What is Google Image Search?

Google has a dedicated version of its search engine called Image Search which helps find images. Claiming to be the most comprehensive image search facility on the web, it has billions of images from websites already within its index. When searching for images, you can tailor the search for various sizes and choose a specific type of image you’re looking for, such as a photo, clipart or head shot.

When clicking on a image, the image will load as a preview in one frame, whilst showing the website the image is from in a frame below. This gives you the option of visiting the website or enlarging the image to full size. Google Image Search is popular. It actually gets more traffíc than Yahoo, Window Live Search and Ask Jeeves.

Why is Google Image Search Important To Me?

As mentioned, Google Image Search gets more traffic than supposed major search engines in the UK, typically getting more visits than websites such as Amazon and MySpace (Source: Hitwise). This means Google Image Search is a potential source for traffic to your site, and although perhaps not as targeted as conventional search, implies that people are actively searching for what you provide.

The biggest reason to start optimizing for Google Image Search is that it is not as competitive as normal search, despite the great amount of traffic it can provide. Although ranking well in Google Image Search itself does not help your conventional search engine rankings, a byproduct of ranking well in Google Image Search could mean this will happen eventually because of the viral potential.

How Do I Get My Images onto Google Image Search?

You cannot submit images in the same way you can submit your website or sitemap to Google. Results are entirely shown by Google’s algorithm after indexing all websites it finds. Google’s imaging spider is called Google Image Bot. It crawls the web and indexes all of the pages it can find. Being a program, it cannot ’see’ images, so it has other ways of determining an image’s relevancy. These factors are:

1. Descriptive Image Name

When optimizing a website, we have talked about relevancy in other articles. It sounds obvious, but you have to talk about what you do. Integrating keyword phrases into this content is essential and makes a genuine difference to rankings. In a simplified way, this is no different for images.

Your images should be named after their subject. For example, if you want to come up in Google Image Search for David Beckham you should call it something along the lines of ‘david-beckham.jpg’ as opposed to something generic such as ‘photo1234.jpg.’ Likewise, if you have a folder full of David Beckham images, name the folder descriptively too.

2. Compliant Images

Creating accessibility compliant images works in hand with being descriptive and relevant. There are a number of criteria you have to meet to have an officially compliant image. These criteria are:

• A ’src’ attribute specifying the URL of the image
• A width and height declaration of the image in pixels
• An ‘alt’ attribute that describes the content of the image
• A ‘title’ attribute that contains a text description when hovering over the image

The ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tag are specifically important for optimization as they are way of building in keyword phrases, e.g. David Beckham. Below is an example of how the code and image should look for the David Beckham image:

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3. On Page Optimization

If you’re reading this far, you probably know a fair amount about Search Engine Optimization. In order to get your images ranking well in Google Image Search, you’ll need to have the whole page optimized towards that image. Therefore, try not to be optimizing the page for more than one subject, such as mixing David Beckham with Kevin Pietersen (he’s a cricketer for the Yanks reading this!).

You should concentrate on being descriptive for the Title and Meta tags. One of the more important factors specific to Image Search optimization is not only concentrating on relevant content, but specifically the content in close proximity to the image. Bear this in mind when setting the layout of the page!

4. PageRank and Backlinks

Another factor shared with general Search Engine Optimization is that Google will rank an image higher if it is on an authority page. This means a page that has backlinks and consequently, a relatively good Google PageRank. Try to generate backlinks to the specific page by visiting forums, blogs and other websites related to the subject matter. Also be sure to internal link to the page so it is indexed quickly and gains some PageRank from your established pages. For both inbound and internal links, make sure they have descriptive anchor text.

5. Website Relevancy

Although important, PageRank isn’t as important with Image Search as with ranking on Google’s main search engine. Website relevancy counts for more, so if you had a whole website dedicated to David Beckham, this would be better than having a single page. If this isn’t possible, try to create a ‘theme’ within your website where you create more than one page about the subject matter. You should then inter-link these pages.

Website Relevancy is considered of growing importance within the SEO world and should be factored into your website wide optimization planning.

6. Image Storage

Related to relevancy, Google’s Image Guidelines suggest saving all related images in the same folder. If Google can see you concentrate on this subject, this could potentially boost your ranking within Google Images. Likewise, if you talk a lot about the chosen subject across many pages, you may want keep them under a well titled sub-folder.

About The Author
Rob Fenn is an SEO specialist, working within the Webtacular department of the website design firm Sixth Sense ESP, which focuses on Internet Marketing for SMEs. Outside of SEO, Rob is also a Google AdWords Qualified Professional.