Blog on the Side

Darlene --
Good idea, count me in.

--jk
 

Darlene -

There's a couple of tools I can think of that would help this. An observation is that people will be looking for common words to use in some relative similarity to what they type into search engines, so you might well be able to use search engine word and phrase evaluation strategies to help out.

e.g. use "google suggest" data to help evaluate terms; commercial services like "Keyword Discovery" or generally other things under the phrase "keyword research tools".

Another useful suggestion is to track through your internal search logs to see what words people actually do use when doing functions, and then putting in "best bets" alternatives when they search for the wrong phrase. Lou Rosenfeld and Rich Wiggins are working on a book on search log analysis for Rosenfeld Media, there's some ongoing discussion on the blog for that book.
 

Edward

Both excellent ideas ... I haven't written about the power of mining search logs on my blog but I have in a couple of my columns and made note of Rich Wiggins' work and others in this area where they have create "best bets". BBC was particular active at reordering/weighting what comes up as major stories unfold to reflect what people probably wanted to see based on terms entered.

What is particular useful when you do your search log analysis, is knowing what page they were on when they entered the search term. If the very thing they are searching for is on the page where they entered their terms, then two likely culprits spring to mind -- the labeling/terminology or page design.

It's tricky with analyzing search logs for new services - often people aren't looking/searching for them because they don't expect to find them at all on your site.

Using SEO keyword research tools is a neat idea for finding high volume terms used by lots of folks. I use these wearing other hats but didn't think of applying them to labelling on library websites.

Darlene