Building Findable Websites
Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond by Aarron Walter

I just read the excellent book, Building Findable Websites, and it truly is the book I’ve been searching for over the last couple of years. I’ve been interested in search engines and how they work for a long time and I’ve been dismayed with the emphasis on Search Engine Optimization over other methods of building findability. This book serves as a great introduction to findability and is chock full of how-to’s and how-not-to’s.

Who’s It For?
This one comes close to really being for anyone involved with creating a website, though I think the people that I most want to read it (the decision makers) probably won’t. It’s mostly for website developers and it’s great for one-person shows (like myself) because it covers coding, creating content, working with the server, blogging and even how to add search to your site and how to use a mailing list to bring traffic to your site.

Why I Loved It
Not only did I find information I could use immediately (a clear explanation of the current state of image replacement techniques, how to write meta descriptions, microformats), I also found support for many of my own beliefs about findability:
No need to put in the meta tag with keywords, search engines ignore them.
Following web standards will help your findability, but just web standards won’t make your site rank number one on Google. Blogging software like Wordpress isn’t penalized by Google for having content in multiple places (It seemed strange to me that Google would penalize the users of Blogger, which it owns).
And findability isn’t just about Search Engine Optimization. I love Aarron Walter’s explanation of the goals of findability:

“1. Help people find your website.
2. Help people find what they are looking for once they arrive at your site.
3. Bring your audience back to your website.”

Yep, that’s what it’s all about.

Minor Quibbles
Actually my only quibble is that the third chapter is about server-side strategies, which are pretty advanced and require good access to your web server, which you may not have if you get your hosting from someone outside your company. I would probably have put that chapter later in the book, but we do all know how to skim, right?
Final Word
This book earned a place beside the other books I always refer to when creating a website: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, Bulletproof Web Design, and Web Standards Solution. I’m using some of the techniques I learned in the book in my current project and look forward to using more in the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.