It’s really easy to suggest to someone that when they build a web site, they should try to figure out what words their targeted audience will use to find the site.

That advice can mean considerable effort. Just who is the targeted audience? What market or markets are they part of? Which other sites are in a similar or the same niche, attempting to attract the same people.

It’s easy to tell someone to build pages filled with what you think are the trigger words or the keywords that people will expect to see on the pages of the site, or use to search for those pages.

But, are we fooling ourselves when we assume that people know which words to use to find your site? William A. Woods, in an article on Searching vs. Finding tells us that:

One of the problems that makes searching difficult is that people often ask for information using different terms from those used in what they need to find. Researchers have explored a variety of techniques for addressing this problem, some of which use various kinds of knowledge. I have been trying to understand what kinds of knowledge are necessary to make connections between what you ask for and what you want.

His research isn’t aimed at helping people learn how to search better, but rather how to make computers work better to help people find what they are looking for regardless of how well or poorly they search.

The article looks at problems with stemming and semantics. It discusses problems with dictionary interpretations:

One reason that a dictionary of known words is important is that without it, many ordinary words would be incorrectly analyzed as being morphologically derived from other unrelated words. For example, delegate does not mean to take the legs off something (de+leg+ate), and ratify does not mean to infest with rodents (rat+ify).

It covers some other means of enhancing search. It’s an interesting look underneath the hood at different methodologies that a search engine can use to discover pages on a site, and on the web.

But it has me thinking about some of the things I should try to do to make it easier for those looking to find a page I build:

Talk to members of the targeted audience; hold conversations with people who have experience selling to those people; make certain that you aren’t using insider jargon that customers won’t use. If the site has been around for a while, look at customer communications for the words that they use to describe goods and services. Also look through log files to see which words people might have used to find the site.

How do you find the right words?