Optimizing Portals for Search

Optimizing Portals for Search Results

To improve the quality of search results on portals, there are a few recommended practices: 

  • Do not specify keywords or related questions until after the search behavior is known. These are used for search tuning and specifying them before the search behavior is known is counterproductive.

  • You can also update the Dictionary in the Administration Console to include words that may be used as search terms. For more information on updating Dictionaries, see eGain Administrator's Guide to the Administration Console. 

  • If an article is not appearing at the top of the search results for a given search string:

    • Add a related question containing all of the search terms. Try to make the search terms appear consecutively in the same order as in the search string.

    • Add a summary containing all of the search terms. Try to make the search terms appear consecutively in the same order as in the search string.

    • Add an entry in the Tune Search Results view in the Search Tuning tab of the portal configuration.

    • Add the search terms to the article keywords.

  • If an article is appearing at the top of the search results for a given search string, but should not be:

    • Add an entry in the Tune Search Results view in the Search Tuning tab of the portal configuration.

  • If a search string produces very few search results or no search results at all:

    • Identify search terms that should have related terms (for example, Ford and car), and create related terms for those search terms in the Modify Related Terms utility in the Administration Console. For more information, see eGain Administrator's Guide to the Administration Console. 

    • Enable related terms for low quality search results in the Search Tuning tab of the portal configuration.

Optimizing Portals for Search Engines

To improve the quality of search engine search results for portals, it is recommended to have descriptive page titles and good meta descriptions. For more information on the topic, see http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624&topic=2371375. 

For Articles:

  • The title of the article page reflects the name of the article.

  • The summary metadata field is populated from the Summary (SEO) field of articles.

  • The keywords metadata field is populated from the Keywords (SEO) field of articles.

For topics:

  • The title of the topic page reflects the name of the topic.

  • The description metadata field is populated from the Description (SEO) field of topics.

For the home page:

  • The description metadata field is populated from the Description (SEO) field of portals.

Therefore, make sure your article and topic titles are well defined, and your article summary and article keywords fields as well as topic and portal description fields contain meaningful non-repetitive information.

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