Internet Marketing Course -
Site Search
Do you have a comprehensive site search function on your Web site?
What does that have to do with marketing your Web site?! A lot!
One of the most important things you can do to market your Web site is to make it as user-friendly as possible. What’s the point of trying to attract visitors to your site if they can’t find what they’re looking for when they get there?!
There are numerous studies showing that visitors will leave your site almost immediately if they can not find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Even if you do a good job with navigational aids on your site, there’s no way to guess what each visitor is looking for. Therefore, the next best thing to designing a unique site for each visitor is to provide a comprehensive search function on your site.
Sounds good, but how do you do that, especially if you’re not a CGI or HTML guru, and you can’t spend a ton of time or money on a comprehensive search function? Actually, it’s very easy – the search function on this Web site is a great example of how that can be done.
Update – July 2007
As of July 2007, Google is now offering a similar hosted Web site search service without advertising for small/medium sized Web sites. It’s called “Google Custom Search – Business Edition” (Google CSBE) and it has 3 price points for Web sites of varying sizes: 1-5,000 Web pages, $100/yr.; 5,001-50,000 pages, $500/yr.; and over 50,000 pages, contact Google for pricing.
Google CSBE is worth checking out, especially if you haven’t added site search to your Web site as yet. Here’s a link to the information on Google:
