Busy busy busy & our adventures with Google

Wow things have been hectic for me over at Code Required recently so apologies for the lack of posts since early December - ouch!

We've been doing some really cool stuff with the Google API recently and have spent several hours geeking out with the guys down at Google HQ in London - which has been great fun and a steep learnign curve for us!

We'll be publishing some articles on Google Apps, Google Sites and the Enterprise Search application in the next few months so watch this space! We must admit we're very very excited about the Google Sites stuff so suggest you all check it out and post your samples back here as we'd love to see what everyone is doing!

Anyway - we're still alive so watch this space!

Google's use of Meta tags... The debate goes on...

So we've all heard how Googlebot no longer uses meta description or meta keyword tags to index your webpages in it's SERPS listings; and how it uses the actual page content to evaluate the "PageRank" etc... Well with that in mind many web developers/agencies/SEO "experts" often neglect to include meta tags in today's market... Well think again!

A recent post on the Offical Google Wemaster Central Blog explains how Google DOES use meta tags (well the meta description tag at least). Now, although this may or may not have an impact (our research shows that it most certainly does have an impact) on your actual positioning as such, it certainly can have a huge effect on your links "clickability".

The post explains how the meta description data is used to support the link so people can determine if it's your content they were actually looking for... Therefore, our research certainly indicates, that as more people visit your site, Google increases it's importance... Thus how you sell your content in the meta description tag must have an impact on your SERPS positioning.

Integrating site searches

A common query for a lot of websites we build is "can we have a search site function?". As advocates of making the web as usable as possible and subsequently the sites we build as near as damn it to perfect (pending our client's spec's of course ;-)) we're all behind this concept but what if you're simply building a basic website, maybe one without a CMS, or a simple CMS system that doesn't use a database, to index content?

We've built several of these sites as you can well imagine and it's often led to bespoke search apps built or for those less "corporate" minded clients Google's Search API more than suffices but to seemlessly integrate it into your sites costs the client money... Which we all know they don't like to part with - so what are the alternatives?

Paid search solutions are everywhere - just whack "site search" into Google and there are hundreds - for the record we think PicoSearch is one of the better ones - but what about free solutions?

Well on our previous Code Required site we used KSearch which was great but pretty complicated to setup - especially on shared servers when you may not know your perl or site roots without some pretty indepth investigation.

Anyway, before I bore you all to death, we're loving our latest find, it's free, simple to integrate and even comes with a setup installer (which we didn't try ourselves as we went for the more laborious manual approach)... Damn it get on with it... It's called "Perlfect Search" from Perlfect Solutions.

So why do we love it so? Well number one it's free; two: easy to integrate; and three: easy to customise.

The biggest draw for us though was many of these free Perl search scripts scan the WHOLE of your documents so you'll get unrealistic search results. For example, let's say, you have a global navigation included in all your documents with leywords in (not uncommon right?) then this will get indexed.

Perlfect Search is different - by simply adding some basic comment tags aroound blogs of code you want the indexer to ignore you get pretty accurate results to your searches.

For those who, like us, couldn't find these tags or advice on how to implement them simply surround the blocks of code you want Perlfect Search to ignore with:

<!--ignore_perlfect_search-->

and

<!--/ignore_perlfect_search-->

...That's it!

Nice one Perlfect!

DNN - Returning Page titles in place of Module titles for Search Results

Those of you using DotNetNuke (DNN) as the platform for your site build have probably encountered the problem where that DNN displays the module name in the search results and NOT the page name.

There is a pretty simple fix to this. In SearchResults.ascx.vb (located in admin->search) simply add the public function "FormatTitle" as per below:

Public Function FormatTitle(ByVal TabID As Integer) As String

Dim strURL As String

Dim objTabs As New DotNetNuke.Entities.Tabs.TabController
Dim objTab As DotNetNuke.Entities.Tabs.TabInfo

objTab = objTabs.GetTab(TabID)

strURL = objTab.Title.ToString()
If strURL = "" Then
strURL = "Home"
End If

Return strURL
End Function

This will get the page name from the TabID returned from the stored procedure GetSearchResults.

Next, to display the page name, add the following line to SearchResults.ascx:

<asp:HyperLink id="pageTitle" runat="server" CssClass="SubHead" NavigateUrl='<%# FormatURL(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,"TabId"),DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,"Guid")) %>' Text='<%# FormatTitle(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,"TabId")) %>'></asp:HyperLink>

And you should now see the page name in your results set instead of the module name!