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- Use a web analytics tool to generate reports of search queries. XperienCentral usually generates search queries where the search terms (keywords) are included in the URL. Most web analytics tools provide a way to search for specific URLs. Search for URLs with the string ‘
&keyword=’ and generate some reports: for the last month and for the last year. Example: in Google Analytics this can be done by navigating to ‘Content > Top Content’ and then entering ‘&keyword=’ in the ‘Search for URLs containing’ box. - Listen to your visitors. If you have the chance, then talk to your website visitors. If they complain about the search engine then call them or email them and ask the two main questions: “What were you looking for?” and “What did you expect?”. Also ask which queries they used.
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One way to do this is to organize a session where someone presents the top search queries and summarizes the feedback from search engine users. In this session an attempt could be made to link the top queries to the most relevant pages. Make sure that everyone is aware that it’s not only about what visitors want to find, but also what the organization wants them to find! . This is not only important for companies who want to sell products or services, but for any organization. It’s all about conversion, and conversion is not only about leading visitors to ordering the most expensive product, but also about answering questions for citizens (for governments), finding the self-service page etc. Write down the links between top queries and pages, plus other suggestions from the content experts.
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- Do visitors always want the most recent documents first, or is the relevance more important than the document date? Is this for all documents, or only some documents?
- Do visitors expect a) answers, b) links or c) direct information? This is different from asking “do we want to provide our visitors with answers/links/direct information?”. Choosing a) for example can have a lot of implications for your information structure and search engine, but if that is what visitors expect than this should be the goal.
- Do we really need to include our 10.000 document management system in the search index? Does it bring anything extra, or does it just lower the relevance of our normal web pages?
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Improvements
After this session it’s time for some homework again, because then it’s important to find out why a certain top 10 query leads to page X and not to page Y, which is the best page according to the content experts. The Setup tool can be used to get more information about the relevance score for the queries.
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These factors tell the search engine how important a field is. By default the title is 10 times more important than the location. If the ‘keyword’ field is filled with non-relevant results, or not filled at all, then it might be smart to clean up all keyword settings or set the keyword factor to a lower value (5 or 1). Tip: Don’t use ‘default the default meta keywords settings’ in Config > Web initiative configuration > [General]settings. Leave it empty.
The same goes for the ‘title’ title field. In most (default) presentations the title field is prefixed with the same value on every page, for example the company name. If it’s import that the company name leads to a specific page then this is almost impossible, unless you remove it from the title or lower the factor.title setting. For more information about using the properties.txt file see chapter 4.1.
These checks will help to improve the relevance for certain pages by analyzing what’s actually indexed and removing unnecessary information or changing the index factor. After changing index factors or changing the presentation it’s necessary to fully re-index the website again because documents are not indexed alone, but in relation to the other documents. To get accurate results this is necessary.
Improvement Suggestions
Besides carefully analyzing what is indexed and tuning all the fields and indexing factors, there are many other improvements that can be implemented. The best approach is to try to improve the search results first by analyzing the fields as mentioned in the previous paragraph. But luckily there are several other improvements that are known to work well to improve the search experience. Here is a top 5:
- Divide your website in several parts, categories or other logical parts. For example if you have a forum or document database on your website then index these sources with additional metadata that can be used to create additional filters. This is explained in the ‘How-to’ chapter.
- Offer advanced search and filtering options, such as searching in site categories, document types, date ranges and sorting by date instead of relevance. Optionally create a simple search interface and an advanced search interface.
- Provide search tips to website visitors. Show example queries, preferably from the query top 10 of course. Explain how to use the advanced search options, if they are implemented.
- Remove pages or documents from the index. By removing documents the total amount of documents is lower and therefore the relevance of the remaining documents automatically increases. Usually there are groups or types of documents that may be nice to index, but are not relevant at all for the average user.
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- This could also be a bit tricky, so be careful not to remove too many documents.
- Implement a "best bets" search.
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