Telescope: Everything You Need to Know About Search

Welcome to this edition of Telescope on Search, our monthly newsletter devoted to search. Our goal is to offer a regular, quick-browse e-newsletter with useful information, tips, and news of the latest developments on Site Search, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, and site usability. If you have any feedback or questions please direct them to newsletter@sli-systems.com.

Feature: Have You Looked at the Many Facets
of Your Site Search Results? Part 2

In our last issue, we discussed the benefits of faceted search - the term used to describe the categorizing of search results to enable site visitors to refine their search results. This time we'd like to acknowledge the way faceted results can also help improve your site's navigation and SEO efforts. How does this work?

The facets used on search results pages can also be used to make great navigational links. Navigational pages show all the results associated with the facet selection, such as category, brand, etc., whereas the search pages only show the results that contain the search term. Apart from that the pages are the same: on both you can use the facets to further refine the results, the sorting options and the page navigation are the same.

To see how this works visit our customer: Footwear, Etc. (www.footwearetc.com). Along the top of the page you'll see the main site navigation links: "mens", "womens", "accessories", and "sale". If you click on any of these links you are presented with the relevant products from that area of the store. The pages shown for each of these navigational links look like search results pages, even though no keyword terms have been used for a search.

Using a single approach for both search and navigation ensures a consistent user experience for your visitors and your merchandising efforts (e.g. jump pages, contextual banners, promoting best sellers, excess stock, etc.) can all be managed via one system. We'll talk more about merchandising in our October newsletter.

Faceted navigation can also significantly increase your exposure to web search engines and help drive more traffic to your site. With correctly structured links you can allow the search engine spiders to index every valid combination of your facets. For example, if you have 3 facets with 5 options each there would be 125 possible combinations. What's more, by including the facets into the title you can create a unique title for every page. Not every combination of facets will be valid but you can see that faceted navigation has huge potential to improve your search engine optimization.

Not sure if you're using faceted search and navigation to its fullest potential? Our team of search experts are happy to help. Contact us at sales@sli-systems.com.

Tips 'n' Tricks: Incorporate Good Titles in Your Search Results

A simple but often overlooked part of site search, is website page titles. Descriptive product titles help you build a useful site search and improve your search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines may use the text in the title tag of your page, e.g. <title>Blue Widgets</title>. This should accurately describe the contents of the page and entice people to click on it. Often these titles will be used on the site search result pages. Unfortunately, many content management systems will set the title tag to a default value (e.g. Company XYZ). Unless this is changed it will mean that your pages in Google and on your site search will ALL have that same title.

Not only will good titles mean that your search results look better, but the more relevant results will rank higher. Search engines rank matching words in the title higher. For example, a search for the keyword term "blue widget" will result in higher rankings for pages that have the term "blue widget" in the title than those that only have "blue widget" in the text of the page. Feel free to contact us if you would like more information.

If you have any tips or tricks you'd like to share, email us at newsletter@sli-systems.com.

SLI Systems & Customers in the News

Below are links to recent announcements and news articles highlighting our Learning Search service:

Search Engine Watch: Site Search Volume More Than Web Search Volume - September 13, 2006

Chief Marketer: Search or Destroy: Is Your Site Search Turning Away Customers? - August 25, 2006

Internet Retailer: New site search features help Carolina Rustica boost sales by 30%, it says - August 31, 2006

LabSafe Deploys SLI Systems' Search Solutions to Put Critical Medical Information in Customers' Hands More Quickly - Sept. 12, 2006

If you have any comments or suggestions for future issues please email us at newsletter@sli-systems.com.