How to Add a Search Engine to Your Website

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Adding Search Engines Instills Confidence

Searching for answers -- That's what people do when they surf the Internet. So, it's not that amazing to see how many visitors use a website’s internal search engine to look up information. Interestingly, most of the information that people search is normally indexed in the Site Map.

This underlines the principle that people have different ways of locating content on a site. In order to accommodate all your visitors, you need to learn some basics about how to add a search engine to your website.

One advantage of doing this on your site is that it provides a convenient way for people to locate whatever information they want using terms familiar to them. If they are able to find the items of interest they are looking for on your site, they are less likely to be disappointed and less likely to go away albeit it is under a different name.

Search Engine Scripts

So how do you add search engine to website? You do this by installing a search engine script. There are two ways of doing this; one is by outsourcing a pre-formatted script and the other is by installing one you have created. An outsourced script does not need to be installed or configured.

When you use a free outsourced script, simply paste a few lines of code into your site and customize the search result page. This however, has a downside. You do not have full control of how the search function will work and how it will be displayed on the site. In addition, the script may come with advertisements which you will have to put up on your Internet site. Some sites will even impose a limit on the frequency of re-indexing your site.

Installing your own search engine script when you want to add search engine to website thus helps to circumvent the above disadvantages. If you are a beginner in web deisgn, don't worry. You do not need to know how to write a script in order to be able to add your local search engine. There are numerous scripts online you can get and adapt for your site.

If you use your own script you can customize your results to your heart’s content, you do not need to worry about third-party advertisements except those that you own, you can re-index your site as many times you deem necessary and any re-indexing does not increase bandwidth utilization as opposed to an outsourced script.

If you decide to add a search engine to your website, you will improve the site navigation and the likelihood of your visitors book-marking it increases once they realize they can locate relevant information on it. This is an easy way of traffic generation which means your potential customers are returning.

And, why not put up a mailing list form while you're at it to capture names and emails?

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