- Preparing to Work
- Setting Up Your Atomz Account
- Creating the Web Site
- Making the Search Come to Life
- Indexing and Testing Your Site
- Conclusion
Indexing and Testing Your Site
A search engine can't return any results unless it has "crawled," or indexed, your site. Basically, this is a database of information about your site's contents, including all the text, alt tags, and even the text contents of standard formats like Adobe Acrobat PDF. Large search engines are usually automated, and Atomz Search can be as well. When you first create your account, no index is created and the search feature doesn't work yet.
Generating your first site index and setting up a weekly time for automatic updates is really a simple matter, though.
If you're not still logged on to the Atomz.com web site, go to http://www.atomz.com, click the Customer Login button, and enter your account login and password. Click the Index menu item on the left. On the right side, click Full Index. This opens a page with some information, options, and an Index Now button. It's a good idea to click the Clear index cache and Count all pages options. Then just click Index Now.
A countdown graphic appears. When the countdown gets to 0, it displays Click here now. Click it to view the index status. Because this site is small, it shouldn't take long to index. When you're done indexing, a listing will show the number of pages in the site and the number of words indexed.
Now that you've created the initial index, open your browser and view your site. If you've followed everything up to this point, your search should be working. Try searching for these words and phrases: Bracelets, Gold Earring, Silver. The search results page will not look exactly like your site at this point. You can leave it like this if you choose, or you can customize the look to suit your needs.
NOTE
There are many possible reasons why a page or group of pages cannot be indexed. If you get a message that some pages weren't processed during the indexing process, you can always go back out to Index>Full Index Log to view all the results of your last index. This can help you troubleshoot a number of problems, including dead links and incorrect security settings on files and folders.