ScreenSteps

Improving article search results for specific terms

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Additional search terms will improve how your users find your training docs while searching your ScreenSteps knowledge base in ScreenSteps or using a search engine like Google.

There are 3 meta fields available:

  1. Additional Search Terms: Search terms that the ScreenSteps search engine will use when searching your article.
  2. SEO Title: Changes the page title tag for the article. This is the title that will show up in search engines (like Google).
  3. SEO Description: Changes the page meta description tag. If your site is public search engines use this information to provide a preview of the article.

SEO title and SEO description will only affect external search engines like Google. If your knowledge base is marked as Private or isn't being indexed by search engines, then do not worry about SEO titles and descriptions because Google isn't indexing your article.

To learn how to add additional search terms to an article refer to the Add additional search terms

How additional search terms affect search results

Additional search terms will make it easier for your users find articles in your ScreenSteps knowledge base using alternate search terms. 

For example you might write an article titled "How to insert a widget," but your customers also refer to widgets as gadgets. If they type in "gadget" in the search field they won't get any results. By adding additional search terms you could add the word "gadget" to the article and they would be able to find the article by searching for either "widget" or "gadget".

When you search a ScreenSteps site some parts of an article are given more weight than others. The weight given to each part of an article will affect where in the list of search results an article appears. 

The article title and additional search terms carry the highest weight and articles with the search term in either of these fields will appear higher in the list of search results. The next most significant field is tags followed by article content.

How should I format additional search terms?

You do not have to separate Search Terms by commas or quotes. Just put a space between each word.

Whatever words you enter in the "Search Terms" box will be indexed. If a user enters keywords in the ScreenSteps search field, and any part of the keywords are terms in the "Search Terms" box, then the article will show up as a result.

SEO fields will not be exported to external services such as Zendesk.

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