Search Engine Optimization

[Virochana]

Does anyone understand how best to get online help picked up by search engines.

For us there are 2 very important requirements for a help system
Single Source (app help. online help, printed manuals)
Ability to have help searched

I understand that framed sites are difficult to get searched, however i also understand that there are some work arounds
Doc to Help has some of these implemented

Basically the 2 challenges are
1) to get the help topics crawled
2) when a help topic shows on a search engine, some javascript on the page will display the contents on the left, not just the frame content on its own (or alternatively as a minimum show some tesxt with a link when the frame content is on its own).

As a last resort, to keep the single source objective, i am considering creating some kind of software to tap into the stylesheets and documents from a mad cap project and bring them together in an alternative package that can be used for an online help system that is searchable, but it would be much easier if there is an easier way.

Some Ideas:
1) there might be a simple solution already out there???

2)if the frame system is kept, then is it possible to create a crawl list for a spider that includes a query parameter. This query parameter is not normally used, but could be used to load a topic when present. The frame on seeing a query parameter would then need to reload itself with the parameter in a post, so that it removed from the url.

3) take the performance hit of getting rid of the frame system and reloading the contents each time, in order to get unique urls which are easy to spider

4) use ajax, if there is a solution for spidering in this method.

Anyone out there have some wisdom in this very important subject. Suprissed not to see more on this on the forums.

Michael Khalsa
Silver Earth

[Virochana]

I did some more research online

Ec software claims their Help & Manual online help is search engine friendly.
I did some tests


Here is there help home
http://ec-software.com/help/index.html

I then extracted the relative url of a random page and went direclty to that page

http://ec-software.com/help/hm_quickstart.htm

The page displayed fine with the entire contents (with the correct content entry selected on the left) as if i had navigated to that page in the contents
and showed this url in browserr: http://ec-software.com/help/index.html? ... kstart.htm

Next i went to a page that had some fairly unique text on it and entered it in bing search
Tools included with Help & Manual

The search engine showed the correct help page at the top of the search results
bing had the link like this
http://www.ec-software.com/help/hm_advanced_tools.htm

and their help systme converted it like this
http://www.ec-software.com/help/index.h ... _tools.htm

this 100% works

---

Next to compare i went to the online flare help and extracted a random url for frame content and entered it


http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... ttings.htm

Flare shows only the content, however at the bottom was a link to open with navigation

I then extracted some text and bing searched it

'MadCap Feedback and toolbar items'

-->This also showed at top for bing search results

QUESTIONS:
Is this out of the box for flare generated online help, or did they include some extra code in template

is there a way to have the whole context (contents, etc load when the frame content is shown independly such as by a search engine listing?

Thanks

Michael Khalsa

[NorthEast]

QUESTIONS:
Is this out of the box for flare generated online help, or did they include some extra code in template

is there a way to have the whole context (contents, etc load when the frame content is shown independly such as by a search engine listing?

Yes, the navigation links are an option for Flare's WebHelp .
Open the skin, go to the WebHelp Setup tab, and select Show navigation link at top (bottom) of topic.

There isn't a way in Flare to display the topic automatically inside the WebHelp frames; you'd have to use a script to do this.
The script would run have to detect if the topic isn't inside the webhelp frameset, and then use the current topic's path in a CSH call (which is what the navigation link does); e.g. ../Default_CSH.htm#topic.htm, where topic.htm is the current topic path (inside the Content folder).
You'd insert the script in the master page, so it's included in each topic.

I'm not sure if someone has posted a solution in the forums, it's been discussed before but I couldn't find an example.

[jbrock]

Search engine optimization for webhelp is a big concern of ours, too. We're in the process of building out a search engine friendly Flare output. I posted a bit on the issue in the forums over here: WebHelp and Search Engine Optimization. I'll write a post soon when we have it ready.