Lou Franco's Software Business Blog

It’s a cliché that nobody ever wanted a drill, they wanted a hole, but the same is true for search – nobody wants to search -- they want to find. To that end, here are some ways to make content easier to find.

If you make content:

1. Make something worth finding
2. Name it well
3. Put it where people will look for it
4. Use the jargon of the domain, but also use the words that a layperson would use
5. Know the rules that search engines use to determine what words are important and follow them
6. Add meta-data
7. Create for an audience, and then tell them about it
8. Turn non-text content into text and add it as meta-data or related content (use OCR for images, lyrics for songs, transcripts for videos, descriptions, etc)
9. Spell everything correctly, but put common misspellings of keywords somewhere in the content

If you find something that you were looking for:

1. Remember how you first started looking for it (keywords and location)
2. Create more content with links to it using your keywords
3. Add meta-data (add comments, ratings, and tags to content)
4. Copy or create a shortcut in the place you originally looked for it
5. Tell people about it in ways that can be searched (e-mails, tweets, IM, Reddit/Digg/StumbleUpon/Del.icio.us, etc.)
6. Give the search engine feedback if it allows that

If you make a search engine:

1. Sort the results so that the “best” content is first
2. Tell content makers how you define “best”
3. Penalize those that try to game the system and adapt to their behavior
4. Show parts of the content that help searchers figure out if this is what they are looking for
5. Let searchers tell you when you have done a good job
6. Don’t force content makers to do unnatural things to their content for it to be found

If you make content management systems:

1. Allow anyone to add more meta-data to content (comments, ratings, tags, etc)
2. Let content be in more than one place without duplicating it
3. Make the taxonomy of content easy to create and navigate
4. Automatically add as much meta-data as you can