Think about it this way. How many times have you found a site through a major search engine or directory, only to visit site and not be able to find what you're looking for anywhere on site? What do you do next? You go back to search engine and click on next site. That site has lost a customer: you.

Helping your visitors find what they're looking for on your site can cover a great many areas, such as navigation, user interface issues, and lack of a clear "call to action."

But one way around many of those issues is to offer an onsite search engine, so that once visitors hit your site, they can easily find exactly what they're looking for.

The really neat thing about onsite search engines is that many of them are FREE. Yes, you read right: free. Of course, that also means that you may have ads in your search results, which may or may not present problems for you. However, even if you choose to purchase an onsite engine, cost is generally not expensive.

What should you look for in an onsite search engine?

* Good customer support. If you begin to have problems with engine, you want to be able to get help in fixing it.

* Reports that let you know what people are searching for once they reach your site. Just think of GOLD this will tell you! If you don't have a page that covers a particular topic, make one!

* Ease in setting up engine. This may or may not be an issue to you, but if you're like me, you want something that is simple to set up and maintain.

* An extensive "help" section at site that will walk you through setting up engine and answer any questions you might have.

* The ability to keep engine out of certain areas of your site that you don't want spidered and available through search, such as employee areas, password-protected member areas, etc.

* The ability to spider password-protected areas so that your member areas can have their own onsite search.

* The ability to customize search results pages.

* The capability to request re-indexing whenever you update site, or even to schedule re-indexing on a regular basis.

To speed up your download times, most web design experts will suggest that you optimize your GIFs and JPGs so that they download faster. They'll suggest that you make your images smaller or remove them altogether. Or they'll simply suggest that you put less stuff on your pages.

All of these methods work. The problem, however, is that they all involve doing things that you don't want to do. You don't want to squeeze any more quality and color out of your images. The same goes for your content - you put it there because you want it there. Basically, there's only so far you can go with these approaches before you really start to ruin your page.

Fortunately, there's one way to get your pages opening faster without having to compromise your images or your content. This is a simple and effective method, but one that is rarely discussed by web design experts.

To understand this approach, it's important to recognize difference between "perceived" download time and "actual" download time. The perceived download time is time it takes to have enough stuff displayed on your page for visitor to be able to start studying your content. The actual download time is time it takes for entire page and all its contents to be fully downloaded.