Technical. Totally in-official thoughts for webmasters from a webmaster.
The Problem, Why:
Our web site has grown to over 400 pages. By mere browsing nobody will ever find the page he is looking for...
The Idea, How:
Use a search engine. To be more precise, use an internal search engine, as well as external search engines. (These days google is the webmaster's favorite, but that changes every few months)
(Other ideas might be to provide a good site map or index page. That is also why we provide a good council calendar and a what's new page)
More details and solutions, Caveat
Precision
How can we make our pages come up when they are appropriate, and not come up
when they are matching poorly?
There is a conflict: on the internal search you want a page to be found exactly when it matches; on external search engines you want it to be found as much as possible. In my opinion it is more important to be a service to our members than to accumulate meaningless hits from unsatisfied users. External search engines are important nevertheless because even outsiders might appreciate some information; even insiders might sometimes search with external search engines. Requirements for good internal search will get preferential treatment on our pages.
How to be found, and, placement
Externally
In short: use header, title, keywords, and descriptions. There are tons of articles how to get found by search engines. See www.searchenginewatch.com for good information.
Since external search engines may find thousands of pages but people rarely look at more then the top 20 matches (my guess), placement becomes very important. www.searchenginewatch.com tells more then I can handle about getting good placement. The main point boils down to using header, title, keywords, and descriptions again.
Internally
For the internal search engine neither being found nor placement becomes a big problem. If a user gets 400 hits because he used a keyword like "scout", the user will probably repeat his search with another keyword.
Even with a good keyword too many pages can be found and displayed to the user. Make sure that matches are described well. This boils down to titles, headers and descriptions again. The same problem especially occurs with annual events: Use a date in the title!.
Nitty gritty
- Users need to find the internal search engine: Each page needs a link to it ...
- Search engines will not differentiate between official and non-official pages nor will they differentiate between council and troop pages. For our users this distinction is rather important. To avoid confusion, each page has to convey by itself to where it belongs. (Sadly, this means that we have to supervise troop webpages, but that has advantages too.)
- External search engines might keep links for long time. All users hate the "page not found" error messages they get when a page has been removed. As a solution, we simply recommend not removing old pages for an equally long time.
- Browsing will frequently start at a random page denoted by a search engine. The user needs navigation help to find out where he is. Each page needs to have an explicit link to its parent page and to pages of similar interest.
- The search engines we have used cannot catalogue password protected pages.
- Frames hit us again: Some search engines don't follow framed pages and miss cataloging their contents. Other search engines cause framed pages to get accessed without their parent frame. I told you to avoid frames...
