Ryan Hoppe, Director Of Product Marketing, Fast Search
Ryan Hoppe serves as director of product marketing for Fast Search & Transfer, responsible for FAST’s products and solutions in the media and e-commerce sectors. Before joining FAST, Ryan managed product marketing for Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 as part of Microsoft’s Information Worker Division. Ryan has also held product marketing and marketing communications positions at Groove Networks, Bose Corporation, and the communications consultancy Brodeur Worldwide. Ryan holds a bachelor of science degree in communications from Cornell University.
Fast Search offers enterprise search solutions. The company was started in Norway in 1997 and has grown rapidly to become a global organization with offices across six continents. Fast Search is committed to building lasting customer partnerships and a positive reputation. The company caters to clients all over the Internet. In fact, if you’ve used site search-the search capabilities within a web site – then chances are you’ve seen what Fast Search can do.
Jerri: Could you give me an overview of what you’re calling site search?
Hoppe: SEO is about driving traffic to destination sites on the Web. But when someone arrives at a destination site and wants to explore its content, that’s where site search kicks in. You’d be sur- prised how many sites are powered by FAST. We index all of the content on a site- and some- times content off the site – and allow the customer to easily search that data.
For example, TV Guide is a FAST customer. So if you went to the TV Guide web site and did a search for the show “24,” in the past you would just get TV listings. Now, when you search for “24” on the TV Guide site powered by FAST, you might see premium content such as interviews or relevant blog results from offsite locations-all included with the search listings. Providing that additional, relevant content helps build loyalty and keeps people on the site, which in turn helps boost search engine rankings.
There was an interesting study released recently that was done by Susan Feldman at IDC. Her study indicated that up to 70 percent of searches on the Internet occur at destination sites. That means that only about 30 percent of all search goes through general web search engines like Google or Yahoo!. That gives you sense of how large site search is.
Jerri: Does site search fall into the category of vertical search?
Hoppe: Not necessarily. Vertical search is still a web search engine; it’s just crawling vertical-specific content and then using a tuned relevancy model to highlight relevant content in that vertical. The knock against Google and Yahoo! is that their web search relevancy model is too broad and is not really tuned to niche content. Vertical search engines better understand your context and tune their relevancy models appropriately.
For example, if you’re looking for financial data on “bonds” using a vertical search engine, and you search for the word “bond” you would receive information (in the vertical) about financial bonds. But if you typed that same search into Google you might get James Bond very near the top of the results. The web search engine had no idea that you were looking for financial bonds, whereas the vertical search engine understood your context.
Jerri: Is there any value in SEO for site search?
Hoppe: Site search does some bad things and good things related to SEO. I’ll give you the bad first.
Site search provides users with a truly dynamic experience versus static web pages that are prepro- grammed. Landing pages and category pages, for example, traditionally have static content that is chosen by a marketer or merchandiser. Web crawlers are much better at crawling these types of pages with static content and keyword-friendly URLS. A search engine results page, on the other hand, is truly dynamic. It didn’t “exist” before you typed in the search query and hit return. The page- and its content is rendered on the fly. Web search crawlers sometimes have a hard time indexing dynamic pages because they are not part of the site map; they are created at the moment of need.
Now the good. FAST does several things to help improve SEO. First, we can rewrite the URLS of search results pages to make them easier to crawl, inserting search keywords into the URLs. Second, we can work with our customers to create “topics pages”-landing pages focused on a specific topic that use search to draw in the most recent, relevant content on that topic. Let’s go back to the TV Guide example. TV Guide could create a topics page for the show “24.” One area of the page could be a “latest news” box that is using site search to pull in the most relevant news headlines on the show “24” from TV Guide’s internal sources and sources across the Web. It could have a premium content area where TV Guide’s marketing staff can promote their own content. It could have an area on the most recent blog postings. Topics pages help boost SEO because they are part of the standard map, yet have dynamic, rich content that should help generate significant link activity.
Jerri: What’s a tag cloud?
Hoppe: Tag clouds are usually boxes on a web page that help users explore other content related to a topic. We have a feature in our product, FAST ESP®, called Contextual Insight®. It can look at a piece of content (a news article, for example) and extract certain key attributes related to this content (e.g., persons, places, and things) and then associate those attributes with the content. For example, when FAST ESP indexes a news article on the show “24,” it may extract “Jack Bauer” and “terrorists” as attributes from the article. These attributes can be pulled out and made into a tag cloud that is generated dynamically when someone searches on “24” and clicks on the article. Typically the words in the cloud all have different sizes and boldness, so some words would have more emphasis than others, based on their relevancy or weight to the original topic.
Jerri: Is there anything we haven’t touched on that would be important for people to understand?
Hoppe: SEO and site search are very distinct. However, one thing we haven’t discussed is how site search can boost SEO purely by creating a better user experience. A web site that has advanced site search helps build a loyal community of visitors by enabling people to easily find what they are looking for on the site, and helping them explore and discover related content. It also helps recom- mend content to users as it gets to know them, based on their previous search and site interaction habits. By having a loyal base of users who come back to the site more and more, a web site should increase its inbound links, which in turn will drive up SEO. Though this is an indirect benefit, it is important to point out how search is becoming less of a “utility” for users and more of a way to create rich, dynamic site experiences that keep people coming back.
