Congratulations! You’ve Gotten Visitors to your Site! Now, can they find what they're looking for?

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You've Gotten Visitors to your Site!. .
. Now, can they find what they're looking for?By Robin NoblesAs search engine ...
we spend an enormous amount of ... to get targe Congratulations! You've Gotten Visitors to your Site!.
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Now, can they find what they're looking for?By Robin NoblesAs search engine marketers, we spend an enormous amount of timetrying to get targeted traffic to our site. But, once thosevisitors get to our site, can they find what they're looking for?If not, guess what? We've lost a customer.Think about it this way.
How many times have you found a sitethrough a major search engine or directory, only to visit thesite and not be able to find what you're looking for anywhere onthe site? What do you do next? You go back to the search engineand click on the next site. That site has lost a customer: you.Helping your visitors find what they're looking for on your sitecan cover a great many areas, such as navigation, user interfaceissues, and the lack of a clear "call to action."But one way around many of those issues is to offer an onsitesearch engine, so that once visitors hit your site, they caneasily find exactly what they're looking for.
The really neat thing about onsite search engines is that many ofthem are FREE. Yes, you read right: free.
Of course, that alsomeans that you may have ads in your search results, which may ormay not present problems for you. However, even if you choose topurchase an onsite engine, the cost is generally not expensive.What should you look for in an onsite search engine?* Good customer support.
If you begin to have problems with theengine, you want to be able to get help in fixing it. * Reports that let you know what people are searching for oncethey reach your site.
Just think of the GOLD this will tell you!If you don't have a page that covers a particular topic, makeone! * Ease in setting up the engine. This may or may not be an issueto you, but if you're like me, you want something that is simpleto set up and maintain.
* An extensive "help" section at the site that will walk youthrough setting up the engine and answer any questions you mighthave. * The ability to keep the engine out of certain areas of yoursite that you don't want spidered and available through thesearch, such as employee areas, password-protected member areas,etc.
* The ability to spider password-protected areas so that yourmember areas can have their own onsite search. * The ability to customize search results pages.
* The capability to request re-indexing whenever you update thesite, or even to schedule re-indexing on a regular basis.In my training material and resource library at the Academy, Ihad an onsite search engine for a long time. Then, the companyfolded.
Until recently, I hadn't set up another onsite engine,because the one onsite engine that I really wanted to use didn'tindex password-protected areas. So, I "patiently" waited for theonsite engine, FreeFind, to add this to their list of features.When they recently did, I jumped on it, and now both of my onlinetraining programs have excellent onsite search engines throughFreeFind (http://www.freefind.com).But why did FreeFind stand out among the others, and why was itso important to me to wait until they could index password-protected areas? FreeFind offers some features that I couldn'tfind on other onsite search engines, features that would help metremendously with my work.For example:* FreeFind will automatically create a What's New page, afteryou've any changes to the site.
Just think of how much help thatwill be for me with my training material? Between my two programs(beginning and advanced), I have over 1000 resource pages toupdate every single month, and I've been creating the "What'sNew" page by hand. Now, it's automatically created for me.
* FreeFind is the only onsite search engine that enables yourvisitors to find the page they're looking for, then keeps an eyeon it for any changes. Their ChangeDetection (tm) monitoringsystem lets your users monitor a page for content changes, thennotifies them when the page is changed.
If you set up this engineon your own site, it will build traffic by turning casual, one-time visitors into repeat and loyal visitors who return again andagain to look at changes made to the page that are of particularinterest to them. * FreeFind will automatically create a Site Map of your site.This Site Map is an alphabetical listing of the pages on yoursite.
The Site Map will be even more valuable to you if you havea regular, non-password protected site, because it will give theWeb search engines a page of links to spider. * FreeFind will search across several domains.
So, if yourcompany has numerous domains, your onsite search engine willcover each of those domains, without having to set up separateengines. In ConclusionLook closely at your site.
Is it time to add an onsite searchengine? Is it time to make sure visitors can find exactly whatthey're looking for when they land on your site? Are you losingcustomers who get lost and can't find what they want?FreeFind (http://www.freefind.com) is an excellent onsite searchengine that met my exact needs. However, to be fair, and becausethis article isn't meant to be an advertisement for FreeFind,here are some other onsite engines that you may want to consider.Look closely at their features, and find the one that works bestfor you.Other Onsite Search EnginesAtomz: http://www.atomz.comPicoSearch: http://www.picosearch.comSiteLevel.com: http://www.sitelevel.com/FusionBot.com: http://www.fusionbot.comA listing of numerous onsite search tools:http://www.searchtools.com ools ools.html Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .