Providing internal site search to your website visitors is an important function that most websites should focus significant attention on but rarely do. There are many reasons for this, in many cases the internal site search function is provided as a component within a content management system or content development package.

Connect site users to the right content as quickly as possible

Internal site search is important because it is the most direct way for your users to find the content that they are seeking within your site when they either visit your site directly and search from your homepage or indirectly when they arrive from an external search engine which delivers a visitor to your site but perhaps not to the exact page or content that they are seeking. Accurate site search is critical to both content and ecommerce websites since if this function does not work properly or is of low accuracy users will not find the content they are seeking and will leave the site.

Internal Site search should not be ignored

Many sites ignore internal site search because they rely on the existing accuracy of external search engines which can spider and index complete websites and deliver users into deep content within their websites, for example Google will find and index content at almost any level within a site and deliver that to end users so that they find exactly the content they are looking for. This however is not a good strategy since it caters primarily to first time visitors but not to the more important loyal or repeat users which often access a site through direct navigation without searching on a general search engine first.

There are two primary methods to deploy internal website search on a site, which we'll refer to here for lack of better terminology as 'Internally Administered' and 'Externally Administered'.

Internally Administered Website Search
In this method the website operator purchases or deploys some type of internal site search software package on its servers or content management systems. This software then performs the function of spidering and indexing the content on the website and the delivering search results in response to end users queries. There are many high quality options available for deployment of these services at the server and in many cases operators of large websites may develop their own solutions.

Externally Administered Website Search
In this method the website search function is conducted by an external search engine which specializes on the spidering and indexing of individual websites and the delivery of search results from this index. These specialized internal website search providers usually charge a monthly fee depending on the size of the website as measured by number of pages or documents that need to be indexed and how often they need to be spidered and indexed. This service is appealing to smaller websites and website operators that do not have superior technical capabilities to either develop or deploy server based solutions. An additional benefit of these services is that they allow the website operator to upload their page templates on the search results pages so that to an end user the search experience is completely seamless as search results pages look exactly the same as the rest of the site.

In conclusion, website operators should pay significant attention to and focus on internal website search as it is the most direct method to deliver end users the content that they are seeking at the precise moment they are seeking it. Failure to deliver high quality internal site search will result in dissatisfied users, missed opportunities and lost customers.