Got Search?
Like it or not, your visitors will prefer searching your website over navigating it – especially when your website is filled with hundreds of content pages. Fortunately, you can put a search engine on your website without any programming from the wonderful free PicoSearch service (http://www.picosearch.com).
PicoSearch will give you a free account, collect all your webpages, and index your content on its own server. This means they do all the hard work – and all you have to do is insert the HTML code that PicoSearch gives you onto one our webpages.
Easy!
Just hop on over to the PicoSearch website and create a free account. Give PicoSearch your website’s name and URL (web address), and select a few preferences so it can index your site. If your website is only a few pages, it won’t take very long to index.
In the mean time, you can insert PicoSearch’s HTML code onto your Home Page and save it to your website:
<!– Begin Sample PicoSearch Query Box –>
<P><FORM METHOD=”GET” ACTION=”http://www.picosearch.com/cgi-bin/ts.pl”>
<INPUT TYPE=”HIDDEN” NAME=”index” VALUE=”424454″>
<TABLE BGCOLOR=”WHITE” CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 BORDER=0><TR><TD>
<TABLE BGCOLOR=”WHITE” CELLSPACING=2 CELLPADDING=0 BORDER=0>
<TR><TD><A HREF=”http://www.picosearch.com/cgi-bin/index.pl?wherefrom=picobox&type=all” TARGET=”_blank”><IMG BORDER=”0″ SRC=”http://www.picosearch.com/picosmall.gif” ALT=”PicoSearch”></A></TD>
<TD><INPUT TYPE=”TEXT” NAME=”query” VALUE=”" SIZE=”20″></TD>
<TD><nobr><INPUT TYPE=”SUBMIT” VALUE=”Search” name=”SEARCH”></nobr></TD></TR>
<tr><td></td><td align=right colspan=2><font size=-2><a href=”http://www.picosearch.com/cgi-bin/index.pl?wherefrom=picobox&type=all” target=_blank>Site Search by PicoSearch</a>. <A HREF=”http://www.picosearch.com/cgi-bin/ts.pl?index=424454&help=help”>Help</A></font></td></tr>
</TABLE></TD></TR></TABLE></FORM>
<!– End Sample PicoSearch Query Box –>
This HTML code will place a search form onto your website.
Discover What Your Visitors Want
Now that you have a search engine on your website, you can revisit the PicoSearch service from time to time and discover what your visitors are searching for. Sometimes visitors are too shy to send email and ask for what they really want. They’ll anonymously search for it instead, and in most cases, they’ll leave a website if they can’t find something.
You don’t want that to happen. You want to keep your visitors on your website as long as you can, so you’ll need to keep a careful log of what people truly want from your website. PicoSearch will not only give you a free search engine, it will also give you a list of what people look for while they’re at your website. And it’s from this list, you can figure out what you should put on your site.
If, for example, you discover that a bunch of your website visitors search for old record albums, you should begin stocking these items so that they can be found and purchased from your site – rather than from a competitor’s. If you discover that a bunch of your website visitors search for a chainsaw manual, it would be a mistake not to write one and upload it to your website. Failing to do so would prompt visitors to leave your website and go to a competitor who *does* have that manual after all!
You’ve been warned…
