Improving Search Results

How does Google work?

Google creates an index by periodically crawling our public and employee websites and applications. Initially it crawls more often to see how frequently our pages are updated. Google uses this information to determine how often it will crawl and reindex our pages.

How can we improve search results for our customers?

Content owners and Developers; You can help our customers get better search results.

• Make sure that your web pages are up to date and accurate; good, meaningful content means good search results.
• Optimize your HTML pages for good search results.
• Optimize your MS Office documents and PDFs for good search results.
• Conduct a search on the most popular key words or phrases your customers will use to get to your pages.
  • Check the results, and
  • Optimize your web pages and documents

What is a Key Term/Key Match?

• A Key Term is a term that your customers search against frequently.
• A Key Match is the web address or search result that should show up first when your customers search using a Key Term.
• If a page you are responsible for has the information that best matches the Key Term, but is not showing up as a top result, you can request a Key Match through your web liaison.

Can I see an example of a Key Match?

Go to https://www.faa.gov and search for "ATOS." You'll notice a link to https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/atos/ as the first result which has been forced to the top. This is the key match based on the key term "ATOS."