Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for SharePoint Search

still under construction. It's still in draft. Please don't mind my typo, grammer. :)

What Content Creators should optimize

As a content creator, you may find your reader easily find your content in search results. There is a list of things you can do to improve the ranking of your document.

  • Descriptive Text in Hyperlinks

Anchor Text Hyperlinks act as annotations on their target. In addition, they tend to be highly descriptive.

  • Category documents into a hierarchy
  • URL Depth URLs higher in the hierarchy tend to be more relevant.
  • Matching Text in URL

URL Matching Direct matches on text that's in URLs.

  • Putting text in Metadata

Although extracting metadata automatically, still good to enter descriptive texts in titles and authors' metadata. Metadata Extraction Automatically extracts titles and authors from document text if they are missing.

  • Putting content into more relevant file type

Should put useful/important files into more relevant file type. File Type Biasing Certain file types tend to be more relevant (for example, PPT files are often more relevant than XLS files).

  • Basic traditional tuning on keyword frequencies and work variants still apply.

Text Analysis Traditional text ranking based on such factors as matching terms, term frequencies, and word variants.

What Search Administrator should optimize

These are also a list of things a Search Administrator can configure in the Search Setting to optimize the search engine's ranking.

1. Authoritative Sites

Click distance is one of the important dynamic ranking factors used in the SharePoint search engine to calculate the ranking of a hit. Click distance refers to the number of links between an item and an authoritative site linking to the item, e.g. An authoritative site has a link to a document A and in the document A, there's a link to the document B. The click distance of the document A is 1 and that of the document B is 2 (Authoritative site -> Doc A -> Doc B). The shorter the click distance is, the more relevant the item represents. Therefore, by adding an 'expert' site into the list of Authoritative Sites, the contents with links from the site will have higher ranking in the search result.

2. Demoted Sites

Opposite to Authoritative Sites, if there are any outdated or inrelevant sites you do not want to appear in the top of the search results, you can ask the search administrator to add the site into the Demote Sites list.

3. IFilter

If your intranet has any new file type that is not currently indexed by the search engine, please make sure that you have registered a iFilter for that file type. For more details, please visit the Filter Central site

5. Property Search

If it's very common that your intranet user search by property, it's strongly recommended that you add the popular property into the Advanced Search page. Please visit our Searching by columns page

6. Crawl Schedule

How often your search engine index the content of your site also have an impact on the relevance of the search results. Sometime your site has the relevant content, but the search engine just does not know about it.  If your intranet usually has frequent updates and new content, it's strongly recommended that you configure the incremental crawl to start more frequently so that the search engine can pick up the new changes in your site quickly.

7. Hiding lists from indexing

If there are any SharePoint lists you do not want to include in the index, you can specify the lists not to appear in search results.

  1. Go to the page of the SharePoint list you want to hide from the search result (e.g Calender)
  2. Click on Setting
  3. Click on List Setting
  4. Click on Advanced Setting
  5. In the Advanced List Setting page, select No for the "Allow items from this list to appear in search results?" option
  6. Click OK. The list contents will be removed in next crawl.

For more details about the SharePoint's search relevance architecture, please read the overview in MSDN.