Search within my own website
How can I add a search box to my own website?
There are a couple of different options for search boxes.
Sitewide Search:
One way of adding a sitewide search box is to go to DESIGN > ADD TEMPLATE WIDGETS then choose where and what kind of widget you would like on the next screen.
Product Search
To add product search to your shopping page, go to SHOP SETUP > CUSTOMISE DISPLAY OPTIONS
Then choose what kind of search box you would like from the drop down menu by SEARCH OPTION.
Why use our inbuilt search engine?
- Our search results will be displayed within the look and feel of your website, so your main menu navigation is still accessible
- If the results have photo's associated with them a thumbnail with be included with the results
- No other website results nor adverts will be displayed, ensuring that competitors won't be able to poach your traffic.
- Users still have the oprtunity of searching within your site using google, but this option is given them AFTER they have search with the inbuilt search engine.
Why use a third party search widget?
- Our search feature uses a very simple exact match key-phrase algorithm to find matching pages. The order of those pages is predetermined and may not return the most appropriate page to the top.
- Whereas google/yahoo spend alot of time/money refining their algorithms to ensure the best pages are most likely at the top of the results.
- WATCH THIS SPACE - We are constantly working to improve features such as our inbuilt search, the gap is narrowing between 'ours' and 'theirs'
Our Suggestion
- Use our search feature if you don't have too big a website or are very concerned about keeping people on your page.
- Use a third party search if you have a big website and quality/order of the results is most important to you
What is our search logic?
- The order of results is determined by type of pages and or components of the pages. eg
- Our search logic searches the most likely pages first, eg the main menu and submenu, looking for a keyword match on the page title, menu button name or meta description.
- It then searches the products and informational pages for their headings or summary descriptions. It does not search their full text pages at this stage.
- Then it searches the full text of individual single plain pages
- Then finally it searches the full text of individual faq/gallery/advertiser pages
- For the first 2 searches above, it uses a loose keyphrase match, where your keywords must be matched in the right order, but no limit on the space between the 2 words. eg a search for "big bear" will match "big brown bear" but won't match "a bear that is big".
- For the last 2 searches above, it uses a tight keyphrase match, where your keywords must be close together, to use the same example, a search for "big bear" will match "the big bear is brown" but won't match "the big brown bear".
- There are no synonyms used in searches.
- Formating and HTML codes are ignored in the search
Notes on future improvements
- Yes, we plan to address the ordering of results, ensuring that any page with more matches will be listed first.
- We plan to ensure that no page is listed twice on the search results page
- The biggest issue with our search is that there is a lot of content to search, some of it on disk, and some of it in a database.
More From This Section
A link to a really good page explaining how Google search works, how crawling, indexing and serving results happens.
The basic strategy and process for approaching SEO on your website
The most important first step is to consider your keywords and key phrases.
The first sentence of your opening paragraph is the most likely to be read by new cutomers and is highly relevant.
Headings and Titles are significant to all search engines.
You can enter your Meta Title, keywords and description on a page by page basis.
DO enter keywords that you have used on your page. Do NOT enter Meta keywords that are not used on your page. If you want to add a new Meta keyword, then also add it to the content of your page.
Experienced users can get additional benefits from their SEO by tweaking the filenames of the website pages.
See an example for "lawn mowing, gardening and landscaping"
Incoming links are like referrals to your business. More referrals are a good thing, as are incoming links.
Use our Web Stats to monitor your traffic, and for search engine optimisation. See which other websites are giving hits to your website, which search engines are working, and which keywords people have used to find your website. Web Statistics come free with every domain you register and host with us. Learn more here.
You have two options; Update your pages content to be up to date or leave it as a final version. If you leave your content alone, it will rise back up the ranks. Read here for more SEO tips to do with time.
How can I add a search box to search within my own website?
Adwords is a way to get to the top of the google search engine results by paying per click. You will want to track the success of different campaigns.
You should not add dedicated conversion code to your website. Only the measurement ID is required to track conversions in the system.
Submit your website to as many directories and search engines as possible. The more used or relevant they are the better, so concentrate on these ones first.
We do provide Google Sitemap XML feature automatically. We also have an automatically generated public Sitemap on your websites. Learn about the Google site map in the "search engines" area on the left menu in the CMS.
Linking your domain and sitemap.xml file to a bing webmaster tools account will keep Bing up to date with changes to your website, and provide insights into search results and behaviours via their webmaster tools console.
Linking your domain and sitemap.xml file to a Google account will keep Google Search up to date with changes to your website, and provide insights into search results and behaviours via their search console.
Most Google Search Console errors are nothing to be concerned about. Learn what some of the most common Google Search Console errors are and what they mean.
It will improve your SEO if you register your domain names for several years in advance. Squatters tend not to do that, so it sets you apart. It's also safer for your IP.
Search around for more information on the internet, as SEO best practices are always changing. Read some excellent information from Google here.
Provided you follow our guidelines for building your new site and changing your domain name to your new site, your search ranking will not only be preserved but will potentially increase.
Where to add alt-text to banners or images using the tinymce or drag-drop / contentbox editors
In the Drag-drop and Contentbox editors you can improve search engine / website performance by delaying the loading of images that do not appear in the viewable area on page load.
In the Drag-drop and Contentbox editors you can apply a fetchpriority attribute to images.
Learn how to add social networking links to your website.
It is hard to keep pages and files completely private from Google and other search engines. Here are a few guidelines and disclaimers.
You can set a redirect for any page to another via the SEO > FILE REDIRECTS area. This is handy for when you have migrated your website and want to redirect old google search results or have deleted a page and need to redirect.
If you need to make changes to your robots.txt file you can do so via the SEO area of the CMS
There is an option to load many of the JS scripts at the bottom of the page.
If your URL appears to have numbers in it, but there is not yet a filename next to the page, category or product in the SEO area of the CMS, then we advise against redirecting these URLS.
You can update your filenames and meta titles in bulk via the SEO area.
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