Powerful site search can hurt natural web search rankings, study says
Retail web sites that deploy powerful site search features, without also offering extensive site navigation options, risk getting bypassed by search engine crawlers and left out of search engine indexes, TrafficLeader, a unit of Marchex Inc., says in a new report.
“The problem is that a search engine spider arriving at your site won’t use your site search, and if the spider has no other way to access your product content, your product content won’t be crawled and listed in the search engine’s index,” TrafficLeader says in the report, “2007 Marketing Insights for Retailers.”
The report suggests that, at a minimum, retail sites provide a site map with text links to all important product and category pages. But it further suggests that retailers deploy these same links as part of main site navigation, where they’ll be more likely used by shoppers who choose to browse rather than use site search.
The report also recommends other ways to overcome common site problems that can adversely affect a site’s ranking in natural search results.
For example, it notes that product pages should include the actual phrases commonly used by searchers. “You might sell a product named ‘Izod Solid Crested Pique Polo.’ That name will show up in the page title, meta description tag, and the page copy. When Joe Q. Public uses a search engine, he simply types ‘Izod polo shirt.’ Your page doesn’t have that phrase anywhere, so you won’t be found when he’s searching for the shirt you’re selling.”
The report also advises retailers to take advantage of the growth in the number of searches for images, recently estimated at 10-16% of all Internet searches. To make images of retail products accessible through search, TrafficLeader advises retailers to include common product keywords in the image file names and in image display captions. If a retailer stores product images in a dedicated directory, it should make sure that the directory is open to search spiders, the report adds.
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