WINNERS OF OUR KEYWORD SEARCH FEEDBACK COMPETITION

In response to our recent offer of a gift voucher for useful feedback on our new Keyword Search we received some excellent feedback and suggestions. We would like to thank everyone who responded and congratulate Robert Henzell and Carlos Ramirez Cruz, the winners of our competition. Each has been awarded a $100 gift voucher. Their feedback was particularly useful and relevant, some of which has already been acted upon, and can be read below.

Hello Andrew Isles

After trailing your new keyword search tool, I have two suggestions for improvement:

1) alphabetize keywords beginning with the same letter (eg, "R") vertically rather than horizontally. It is easier for the human eye (at least my eye!) to scan for the second and third letters of the keywords vertically down the column to find the ones sought than it is to stop briefly at each keyword and assimilate it to see if is the one being looked for before moving on horizontally (or in a zig zag fashion) to the next one.

2) in a search with multiple keywords, provide a facility to selectively remove one or more of them and add another one instead without having to clear them all and start the search again. For example, in a search with two keywords, after a search with Evolution + China I tried to go back to the screen that displayed the first one only (Evolution) and then to add a different second term (eg, Japan), but the search facility insisted on adding China as well as Japan. It seems all previously used words are included until you start a new keyword search.

Cheers
Robert

Hi,

A half price sale is definitely a good way to catch my attention. I clicked on the link and read the explanation of how your new keywordsystem works.

It wasn't immediately intuitive but I figured it out within a minute. For a second or two, while I was reading the e-mail, I thought that I was supposed to enter the letter "H" into the search text box (on the left), and then the letter "A", and so on.

When I saw that there were actual letters to click on I clicked on them and it took a second or two to realize that when I clicked on a keyword it was then displayed above the letters.

After I selected "Half-price" and then "Australia" I planned to enter"orchid" into the search box (on the left) and then hit the "Go" button. Then I thought I'd check to see if you listed "orchid" as a keyword, which you did. So I added "orchid" and did the search. If I had entered "orchid" into the search box on the left it would have started a new search for orchids.

Now that I know how the system works, which wasn't that difficult to figure out, it will be fairly easy and efficient to utilize in the future. Clicking on tags is less work than typing in search terms.

That being said, based on current trends in keyword tagging, it's probably more intuitive if keywords are displayed with each item and if each keyword is hyperlinked to return all the search results for that keyword. An inherent problem with any kind of search is that often times people don't know which keyword is the best to use when looking for something.

Displaying all associated keywords directly underneath an item is a good way to offer hints that will possibly "hook" users into clicking on keywords that 1. more aptly describes what they are looking for and 2. they hadn't thought of but are interested in, thus increasing the chances they will explore more and hence, purchase more items, in this case, books.

The trick is to allow the user to narrow their results by clicking on the keywords displayed underneath the book. This isn't the easiest thing to do but can be accomplished by including a "Search within results" checkbox. On the user side it's fairly straightforward...when they check that box any keyword they click on is added to their search, when they uncheck that box any keyword they click starts an entire new search.

So let's say I did a search for "orchids" and there were many results. I could check the "Search within results" checkbox and scroll downlooking at the results and associated keywords. If a term like"Australia" caught my eye then I could click on it and the results would be filtered to only include books with the keywords "orchids" and"Australia".

On the programming side, it can be accomplished using Javascript, AJAX and session variables. It's not the easiest programming but it shouldn't be much of a challenge to a seasoned programmer. Although, hyperlinking keywords is pretty easy. For the book table you just add a field called "Keywords" and separate the keywords by commas. When you display the page you just use a function that splits the string on the commas, places them in an array and adds the appropriate URL and hyperlink html to each keyword.

Another benefit of this system is that it's conducive to google indexing and capturing google search terms. Google finds new pages to index based on links. When you add keywords (hyperlinked) to a book, Google immediately adds all the content and links on that page that is being linked to. Up until recently Google wasn't able to discover pages that were only available via search forms and is only just now starting to explore that possibility....http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9918022-7.html

Based on your website, even with your new keyword search function (which is still just a glorified search form) it seems most of your pages (books) are only available by using a search form, so by adding keyword links that display all the results for that keyword you are making sure that Google is easily able to find all those pages to add to its database. The keywords that are on those pages are like "hooks" that capture Google indexing robots as well as search terms that people use when conducting a search on Google.

Oh, seems like you have links to your book categories somewhere as I just did a Google search for site:andrewisles.com and found 14,800results which sounds about right.

Well, there's my feedback, hope it's helpful.

Cheers,
Carlos