How's that porn site coming along? Is it growing? Are you updating it regularly? Are you finding it a little bit difficult to cram all your site links into that puny menu bar? Are things getting a little messy on the old index page? Are your surfers getting lost in the quagmire of your ever-growing amount of content? Would you like to streamline your site? Would you like to have a site where any surfer can find whatever you've got with just a few keystrokes and a click?
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"Why put a search on your site? It's all about convenience, ease of use and consolidation. If you install a search function now, you're all set as you grow." |
Add a search function to your site.
Let's be clear. When I suggest that you add a search feature to your adult site, I don't mean a World Wide Web search. In this article, I intend to explain the benefits of incorporating a search engine that will index your site and your site only. This kind of search is called an INTRANET because it searches within the documents on your domain. This kind of application/script is also called an ENTERPRISE search.
Why put a search on your site? As I illustrated in the opening of this piece, it's all about convenience, ease of use and consolidation. Porn sites get cluttered. Surfers get lost. Your old pages are good pages and they shouldn't be forgotten. If you have a large site with gigs of content, an INTRANET search is almost a necessity. Or your site is small but you intend to add images, pages and other goodies as time goes on.
If you install a search function now, you're all set as you grow. You'll be able to add new keywords to your search script or software on the fly. You'll free your index/main page from a long scrolling column of site link after site link. You'll enable a dynamic environment to your site that will keep users on your domain without the hard sell or hard work. How many times have you lost a surfer because they couldn't find what you promised on the front page?
There's another reason to add a search to your site. The process is wickedly easy. Tedious, but a lot simpler than those geeks at Google make it sound. Hell, adding an INTRANET search to your site might even teach you how to optimize those same pages for INTERNET search engines.
When you add a search to your site, you set up the keywords and terms. By necessity, you begin to think like a surfer. As the administrator of your search function, you learn how search indexing works. The cool part is there are tons of ready-made scripts and software wizards available to the webmaster looking to add an INTRANET search.
All you have to do is find the script, application or software that best suits your needs. How you enable an INTRANET search on your site is dependent on the language and method. You can buy software that creates a CGI or Perl script. You can cut-and-paste a simple JavaScript code into your main page. You can use one of the many free INTRANET search engine providers in trade for flying a banner or text link. You can pay an outside company to manage and host your INTRANET search. You can lease your own ENTERPRISE server. You can hire a programmer to build an exclusive INTRANET search application or servlet.
The difficulty comes with setting things up. You've got to make sure they keywords that you define match up with the META tags, titles and text of the pages within your INTRANET. You've got to optimize your INTRANET pages for your own indexing rules. You'll need to incorporate every possible permutation of keywords and search terms imaginable by your surfers. You'll have to insure those jive with your pages as well. You'll continue to update your search terms and keywords as you add new pages and content to your INTRANET.
Don't let your lack of programming skills stop you from adding an INTRANET search to your site. Though the setup is admittedly mundane, It's a lot easier than you think. To help you better understand how to implement an INTRANET search for your site or to further understand search engines, visit these sites:
For a really nice tutorial on setting up an INTRANET SE, try this splendid one from Webmonkey:
If you really want to get into creating your own search engine that indexes the entire web, check out Alexa's Public Search Platform:
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