Welcome back to Search Engine Academy‘s blog posts on Infrastructure Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO). While most people know and understand a little bit about SEO, many others have never heard of IA, and don’t know how the two disciplines compliment one another. We’ve been showing you in a series of IA and SEO posts going back to the beginning of 2012.
Let’s continue learning more about designing and implementing a site search function for your website. We’ll talk about the different sorting and ranking options you can incorporate into your design specifications.
Alphabet Sorting
This is a nice, general purpose way to sort out information. It’s handy for names, places, products, etc. Consider omitting words like “a” and “the.”
Chronological Sorting
What if the results need to be time-sensitive? If your site features breaking news or updates, this can be a very useful search function. In general, reverse-chronological ordering (newest to oldest dates) is used. Historical data also lends itself well to chronological sorting.
Relevance Ranking Factors To Consider
There are multiple relevance ranking algorithms to choose from. Here ae some factors to think about when determining relevancy ranking:
- The number of query terms in a retrieved document or page
- The frequency of the query term in the document
- The proximity of the query term – in teh same sentence or paragraph
- The location of the query term in the fetched document
- The popularity of the document that contains the query keywords
Relevance ranking can be quite subjective. One document may only reference some information contained in another document, but they share the same search keywords. If human editors do the document or page indexing, there’s a level of subjectivity there.
If there are multiple documents containing the phrase “women’s boat shoes,” what’s the most relevant document? The one that is a product description? Is it the page that talks about what to look for when selecting boat shoes? Or is it a document that lists the different manufacturers, and rates them?
And you could also display a relevance score for each document that is featured in search results. But how can you best determine the most accurate relevancy? It really depends on what your searchers really need from your site.
Popularity Ranking
This is how Google ranks pages they feature in SERPs. This is determined by the algorithm, which changes constantly and has a few hundred different ranking factors that are blended to determine relevancy on a curved, not an absolute scale.
If you and I have competing web sites about SEO, we are going to argue that we should be relevant. In order to be relevant, we are going to compete with every SEO factor at our disposal. But many websites don’t, and so their competition often is more popular than their own site.
User/Expert Ranking
Many social media sites allow their users to rank the information’s value. Digg is famous for this. The more ratings, the more likely that information will show up higher.
Pay For Placement
You can get high ranking pages by paying for placement in high quality directories. There are many paid directories that will put you on the first page of the specific topic area your site is related to.
Let’s wrap up this post; you have a lot to think about, if you’re seriously contemplating instituting a site search box for your web pages.
Until next time, think about how you’d rank results on your website, and if you’re just getting started in SEO, join us at Search Engine Academy for basic or advanced SEO class to learn more.
All the very best to you,
