Month: February 2008

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Website Search Engines

Many of the websites we design are large enough that we really need to provide more than a sitemap for readers to be able to find what they want. I have found that FreeFind is a super online search engine that will spider and return content for searches on your own website. What I like most about FreeFind is that for $5 a month for under 250 pages I can skin the search pages to match any site seamlessly.

What’s the point of having a search engine if you are showing ads or showing Google’s name at the top? On sites I design I like to keep the brand and not showcase another’s brand. I have reviewed several online website search utilities and have found that I like FreeFind best for my needs.

I use FreeFind on my own website and blog and have implemented it for other sites across the web. I pay $108 per year for FreeFind to spider my blog, PDF files, and all my 488 web pages. When someone enters a search query on my site, they are supplied back pages on a page that looks identical to my website ranking pages in my own site on that topic.

FreeFind is easy to use. You can set spider frequency, upload a custom template, configure results to weight pages as more important, and even block the FreeFind spider from files or directories.

I find FreeFind a good value and perfect for my needs.

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Use Labels Effectively

If you are using Blogger or Blogspot as your blog platform your option is to create labels at the bottom of your blog post. It is important to use this feature to help search engines sort your posts and for users to navigate to other blogs of interest.

Label Name Selection
Choose keywords as your label names. I like to use all lower case for my label names as then my words will match more potential search queries than proper case or all capitals. Sometimes even I forget, but try to stick with lower case

Labels as Navigation
I’ve worked on some blogs where we pre-select labels and only use this labels as we are using the labels as a type of blog navigation. This is a good idea if you are really working on SEO tactics and are employing a ghost blogger to one help give them focus and to prevent label bloat.

Choose Labels Judiciously
If you are having trouble with Blogger publishing your posts, it is time to change your label program. Get in and delete labels, regroup posts and chop your label bloat. Blogger simply has real trouble in publishing custom FTP blogs where you have more than 20 labels. Watch your publishing screen if you are having trouble, you will see that every time you publish Blogger has to reload all your labels and appears to get hung up here if you have lots of labels on your posts. If you have four, five or more labels on each post, Blogger will definitely have problems with custom FTP publishing.

WordPress Categories
This is somewhat the same as Blogger Labels. However in WordPress you won’t have the publishing woes that Blogger custom FTP does when you get a lot of categories on your blog. Still keep in mind some of my tips about navigation, capitalization, and keyword use.