Your Intranet Needs SEO

Search Lessons: Whenever I’ve implemented a search engine on an intranet, the first thing I realize is that the content base is not ready for a search engine. None of the pages have unique titles, there are no meta tags, etc.

This guy reiterates that position. He gets asked, “Can searching our intranet be like searching the Internet with Google?”

Well… no. There’s a huuuuge difference between the Internet and your intranet. It goes like this:

The Internet = pages wanting to be found. The same cannot be said for most company intranets.

The solution is to be aware of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) concepts and use them internally:

Step 1: Start thinking about how you optimise your information sources to return relevant results for search queries. How do you [encourage] internal authors to classify information the way bloggers and photo-sharers happily tag their work when publishing on the Internet? The motivations are very different.

Step 2: Consider how much effort you are prepared to assign to ongoing improvements, tweaking the search engine to improve relevance as the index evolves over time. This applies regardless of the technology you choose to use for enterprise search.