I was inspired by comments from LoveTheCoast and Sorvoja to my post titled Give 'em What They Search For. So, I signed up for a site search account over at freefind.com. They said that I would be up and running in minutes and that was true.

Anybody who hasn't tried tweaking a search algo should give this service or a similar service a try. My control panel allows me to weight the relevence of a page based upon keyword presence in: title tags, link text (to both on and off site pages), page URL, image alt tags, image file names, body text, meta description, meta keywords, keyword position in document and a few others. I can also give puny or massive weight to specific files or entire folders.

Its not 10,000 factors like Google uses in their algo - but I quickly learned that it is really easy to generate crappy SERPs.

However, after messing around for little while the results started to get better. Being the author of every page on the site and the person who designed the linkage and named every file came in really handy - I think that you would be at a significant disadvantage if you didn't have an intimate knowledge of the site - and this is why I now give Google a little more respect.

After an hour of tweak and peek I was able to force the pages that I wanted to SERP position for what I think will be the most common querries. To be honest I am gunning for SERPs that are a combination of relevance and salesmanship. Not the way a real search engine ranks pages but I think that its OK if you own the site and your goal is makin' a buck.

The cool thing about this is that the freefind system tallies all of the keywords used in your searchbox, plus you can get a detailed search-by-search history of what visitors are looking for - and click through to sniff the search results that were delivered.

I started out by putting the searchbox on every page of my site in the persistent navigation - above the fold and very obvious. I didn't have the search on the site for more than 15 minutes and checked the search history. Holy Cow! I had a couple dozen searches that fast. People on my Google Maps Mashup pages were typing in geographic locations and street addresses. So I had to yank it from those pages.

Next I noticed that the links in my persistent navigation were giving WAY too heavy weight to the results - so I cut them out of the algo.

I am quickly realizing that a 500 page site will return an awful lot of searches with scrappy results. But that's the whole reason to do this. I want to find out what they are searching for and use that to inform content development priorities.

I'd love to hear comments from anybody who has messed with this type of sitesearch before. If you have not done it give it a try then come back here and tell us what you learned.