New Leaders gets Googled
Over the past 18 months we’ve managed to publish a ton of web pages to our site. After awhile, it became cumbersome to troll through The Leader Board to find a link we wanted to share. We have been wanting to add search to our site for awhile, so we weighed the benefits of building our own search functionality against using Google’s superior and beneficial technology. Well, the results are in. After playing with a number of different APIs, Google Custom Search became our ultimate solution.
I don’t know about you, but I use both Safari and Apple Mail to read my RSS feeds. With more browsers detecting these feeds automatically, we’ve opted to replace the link to our RSS feed in the upper right hand corner with a fancy Google search field, rather than advertise it twice.
The new custom search is dedicated to our site, and for $100 a year Google allows you to remove the ads that are traditionally automatically displayed. We found the results to fit our site perfectly; just like it was always meant to be. We are now in the process of applying for Google’s Enterprise Partnership Program to secure our certifications, so we can implement search technology within private applications. This is something we’ve planned for some time, and look forward to a day when we can use Google to search Signalfire or Electric Checkbook. From day one at New Leaders, we have used Google Apps to create documents and host our email, as well as provide the same functionality for every website we build for customers. It was a natural fit for us to incorporate Google search into our site.
After implementing the new search functionality, we discovered that we weren’t doing a thorough job of making sure every page had a good title, description, alt tags, and keywords associated with it. Naturally, this is work that we do for our customers, but we never really thought about it for our own site. Go figure.
Never fear, our SEO and CSS expert Patrick Alcisto is on the case, feverishly reviewing all of our pages and updating them with quality information. We’re going to refrain from over-optimizing the page content for Google so it reads as well as it can for our visitors. Our plan is to be more consistent when referring to certain products by name or topic — A happy medium.
Search makes it much easier for visitors to find something for which they are looking, or refer to something they read previously, but can’t remember how they found it. It is always a good measure to tell Google to search your site over and over again, and have your visitors help encourage that behavior.
Posted on Nov 24, 2008 by Kevin Milden
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