Sometimes it’s not easy being a search expert. People expect that my Web site will have a great site search. And it should—after all, I do know how to do that. But up until now, I haven’t even put a search facility on my site, much less a good one. And I think my reasons are instructive for what drives decisions at lots of small sites.
“Of course I think search is important,” I spluttered to yet another colleague questioning why I have no search on mikemoran.com—I am attracting this question more and more frequently over the months. I never know what to say to people, but I ticked off the reasons again in my own mind:
- I have other priorities. It is not easy for me to even keep the content on my Web site up to date. I recently went 13 days without feeding the blog. I think that getting compelling content on the site is more important than a search facility.
- The site is not that big. I only have about 50 pages on the Web site itself with another 50 blog entries. I have an up-to-date site map that can help people find things, although I must admit that finding information on the blog is getting harder even for me.
- I need something free. Our book on search marketing is selling well, but it is not making us rich. I don’t want to spend money on technology that is out of proportion to what it is worth in book sales. The really good search engines are usually not free, although there are more choices available than ever.
- I need something easy. I am capable of installing an open source search engine on my site (and so is my wife, who usually does most of that stuff for me, but it all takes time, so I’d prefer a search service.
But I think I am going to take the plunge in the next few days. I looked at Atomz Search and at Google Free. They are both good search engines and they allow me to customize the interface to look like the rest of my site, which is nice. I think, however, I am going to go with ROLLYO. On a site as small as mine, just about any search engine will work, because there aren’t enough results for any one word to stress any ranking algorithm.
So, “Why ROLLYO?”, you may ask. Because it not only offers a free search service to search my site, it also offers a way for me to give you searches of other sites on topics you are interested in. I have already created one on search marketing, which searches some of the best Web sites around for the information you are looking for. If I get a good response to this, I may create a few more searches on other subjects.
So let me know what you think. You can try the search marketing one now and I will make it available from my Web site in the next few days. Thanks in advance for the feedback.
