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It’s a tongue in cheek piece with a sense of humor that attempts to bring our attention back to what’s most important in our work―connecting with our audience. That’s what findability is all about. Using the many techniques explained in my book we can plan, design, and build more findable websites. For findability to be done well it requires buy in from all involved in the project life cycle, which is the premise of the article.

To enter simply head on over to Facebook and join the Building Findable Websites group. Once you’ve joined post your favorite ideas, tips, and/or tricks to making websites findable in the discussion thread entitled “The one thing you can do to help the findability of your site is … ”.

If you’re not the Facebook type then post your findability ideas as a comment on this blog post and you’ll be added to the drawing. A winner will be selected at random on April 7th, 2008 so get your entry in beforehand. I’ll announce the winner right here and will ship the book directly to the lucky devil’s doorstep.

Good luck and may the force be with you!

Now that the manuscript has been transformed into a glossy cover-wrapped volume, I thought I’d share with you my experience. I’ve often wondered what it’s like to devote yourself to a single topic for such an extended period of time, and how the publishing process works. It’s something that is often romanticized as an extended, solitary expedition into deep, meaningful thoughts. Although there’s a bit of romance in the writing process, there’s also a lot of research, attention to form and continuity, second guessing of yourself, and old fashioned hard work along the way.

As a teacher for nearly a decade, I’ve become accustomed to reading my student’s faces to determine whether or not I’m making any sense. Writing doesn’t afford this luxury. For months on end I wrote and wrote sometimes wondering if my extensive passages would provide enough information to the reader to help them grasp my point, or maybe I was getting too detailed which could be patronizing and slow. Of course, my editors Jeff Riley, and Jonathan Snook helped me answer these internal questions along the way, but the feedback loop is a lot different than explaining something in person and changing tack immediately when you see your message isn’t hitting its mark. Somewhere along the way I got over the second guessing and plowed ahead. After chapter 3 I felt like I had found my stride, and the overall structure of the book started to become more apparent.

The Process of Publishing and the People Involved

There were a lot of people involved in the publishing process – a whole team, in fact. As the acquisitions editor, Michael Nolan received my written proposal for the book and a sample chapter then presented it to a board of publishing gurus at Peachpit who evaluated its relevance to the target audience, looked at other books that already explored similar topics, and made a final decision on whether or not to publish it. This was a pretty slow process. I submitted the proposal in April then bit my nails until late July when the official green light was handed down. The writing process didn’t start until August of 2007 -six months after my initial conversation with Michael. After the proposal was accepted Michael acted as the project manager for the book, coordinating the entire team.

Jeff Riley was my development editor. His job was to provide feedback on the form and structure of my writing. He evaluated all formatting for consistency, passed each chapter on to Jonathan Snook the technical editor who evaluated all code and techy concepts, then passed the combined edits and feedback to me. I then made the requested changes or decided to stick to my guns at times and leave things as they were. My changes went back to Jeff for another pass and prep for the production team who handled the formatting and layout.

While I was writing, the design team was working on the page layout and various elements that would be included in each chapter. They used a sample chapter to design the treatments for tables, figures, captions, tips, and various sidebar elements. This was shared with me for feedback, and revised one more time before placing the manuscript into the page templates.Kate Reber – the production editor – coordinated all of the pre-press production of the book. Once she had all of the content into the design we went through each chapter three times to tweak the layout and catch any oversights. A proof reader also went through the entire book a few times again checking for errata and inconsistencies. I’m not sure how many times we all read the book, but I think I read through each page about 8 to 10 times. I think I could now recite it from cove to cover.

A Little Overzealous – Too Many Chapters

I had a lot to say on the subject of findability, so much so that I wrote 5 chapters too many to fit in the book. I started to get nervous about the length in October, and by December we realized that there was roughly 106 pages too many. I felt like I was lopping limbs off of my first born as we excised chapters to make the target length, but luckily all of this content is published on the book’s companion website http://buildingfindablewebsites.com as free PDF downloads. Although these chapters aren’t in print, they’re not lost.

It’s extremely satisfying to wrap up such a long, intense process and hold the final product in your hands. I hope this book achieves my original goal – to create a better awareness of findability and its close relationship to web standards best practices. You can join the findability discussion in the Facebok group.

If you are going to be at SXSW this year or any of the other conferences where I’ll be speaking, please do introduce yourself. I’d love to hear your perspective on the book.

What is findability? How does it relate to SEO, and what is the web standards connection?

You can read my response on the An Event Apart blog.

An Event Apart New Orleans will be held at the posh Hilton Riverside April 24 – 25. The list of speakers and topics covered is fantastic:

• Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS, presenting “Underpants Over My Trousers”
• Aaron Gustafson, co-author of AdvancED DOM Scripting, presenting “Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript”
• Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious, conducting “On-the-Spot Usability Reviews”
• Cameron Moll, author of Mobile Web Design, presenting “Good vs. Great Design”
• Brian Oberkirch, Publisher of Like It Matters, presenting “Kick it Like Pelé”
• Jason Santa Maria, designer at Happy Cog, presenting “Good Design Ain’t Easy”
• Dave Shea, co-author of Zen of CSS Design, presenting “Living, Breathing Design”
• Stephanie Sullivan, co-author of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3, presenting “Design Challenges, Standards Solutions”
• Jeff Veen, design manager at Google, presenting “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps”
• Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Web Sites, presenting “Findability Bliss Through Web Standards SEO”

Plus our hosts Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer will be speaking too.

• Eric Meyer, author of CSS: The Definitive Guide, presenting both “The Lessons of CSS Frameworks” and “Debug / Reboot”
• Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing With Web Standards, presenting both “Understanding Web Design” and “Web Standards: The Return of the King”

Registration for the conference is now open. I do hope you can join us for what’s sure to be a battery charging, mind opening, biegnets chomping good time in the Big Easy.

Here’s what these paragons of the Web industry are saying in support of the book:

Companies waste fortunes seeking a magic bullet for Search Engine Optimization. But the keys to honest, effective web findability are appropriate writing and semantic markup. Aarron Walter’s wonderfully lucid and informative book tells everything you need to know to get your web content (or your client’s) in front of as many appreciative readers as possible.

Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found. In Building Findable Web Sites, Aarron Walter provides an invaluable guide to avoiding obscurity on today’s cluttered Web.

As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I’m currently working on a book to be published by New Riders called Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond. I’ve been teaching a course at The Art Institute of Atlanta called Findability, which teaches students practical solutions for creating findable web content that draws in viewers, and encourages repeat traffic. While researching and developing the course I realized that most of the conversation around the topic is either very theory focused with little practical advice or very SEO/marketing focused appealing to business-minded readers with little knowledge of the way web sites are planned and built.

My book is written for designers/developers who build web sites day in day out. It has three primary goals:

• Help people find your web site.
• Help people find what they are looking for once they arrive at your site.
• Bring your audience back to your web site.

All of the code solutions offered in the book follow web standards best practices, incorporate accessibility recommendations, and address the findability of some contemporary technologies such as Ajax, Microformats, and Flash to name just a few.As the title suggests, SEO is an important part of the book, but findability encompasses many other facets of the web project life cycle too. To give you a sneak peek at what you can expect to learn from the book here’s an abbreviated table of contents.

1. Introducing Findability
   • What is findability?
   • The development side of findability
   • The deepest desires of search engines
   • Beyond SEO
   • Get your team on board
   • Using your moral compass to guide your way
2. Markup Strategies
   • A web standards primer
   • Web standards and findability sitting in a tree …
   • Accessible content is findable content
   • The findability benefits of Microformats
3. Server-Side Strategies
   • Files and folders: the power of a name
   • Choosing and managing domain names
   • Building search engine friendly URLs
   • Getting users back on track with custom 404 pages
   • Moving pages with 301 redirets
   • Optimizing site performance for efficient indexing
   • Choosing a search engine friendly CMS or framework
4. Building Content that Drives Traffic
   • Creating content that sucks (users in)
   • Content karma
   • The mark of quality content
   • Content of many flavors
   • Targeting keywords in your content
   • Content development strategies (various RSS parsing examples)
5. Building a Findable Blog
   • Blogging best practices to improve findability
   • Making your WordPress blog more findable
6. Adding Search to Your Site
   • Using free search systems (Google CSE, Google Ajax Search API, Rollyo, etc.)
   • Using paid search systems
   • Building your own simple product search system
   • Adding OpenSearch to your site
7. Preventing Findability Roadblocks
   • Avoiding JavaScript pitfalls (progressive enhancement, scripted styles, scripted navigation, and Ajax content)
   • Findable Flash
   • Findable audio and video
8. Free Search Engine Tools and Services
   • Building and submitting sitemap.xml
   • Google Webmaster Central services
   • Getting info about your site with Yahoo! Site Explorer
9. Viral Marketing
   • A virus you’ll want to spread
   • Passing the virus to new hosts
   • Building a viral product
10. Places to Promote Your Site
11. Bringing Traffic Back with a Mailing List
12. Places to Promote Your Site
13. Spotting Traffic Trends with Web Analytics
14. Techniques to Avoid and How to Recover From Mistakes
15. Findability Strategy Checklist

These last few chapters are still under development, which is why I’ve only listed their title. There will be bonus chapters available for free on the companion site (once it’s built). The entire book is filled with practical code examples that could be used in any project to improve your site’s findabilty, and avoids the marketing speak typical of other books that address some of these topics.If you have suggestions of content you’d like to see included in the book, please comment on this post. although I can’t guarantee it will make it in the book, I can do my nest to make sure the info you want is available on the companion web site at the very least.

I’ve submitted a proposal myself, and I’m going to shamelessly lobby for your vote! Here’s the synopsis of what my talk will cover:

Title: Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond

Why Vote For My Panel?

• Web standards and search engine optimization go together. I’ll outline how using web standards will help make your site easier to find via search engines
• Do search engines really give a damn if you follow web standards? My panel will give you the answers
• I’ll discuss how Accessibility and SEO goals often overlap
• I’ll provide info on how technologies such as Ajax and Flash can cause problems for search engines and what you can do to address the problems
• My talk will provide plenty of practical info that you can use on any site
• The information is based upon my forthcoming book for New Riders entitled Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond to be released early in 2008

You’ll need to register an account with the panel picker (don’t have to sign up for the conference) in order to vote. If there’s something specific you’d like to learn about in this panel, shoot me an email and let me know.

I appreciate your vote! http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/436

Jeremy Keith, Bruce Lawson, Rob Cherney, and many other JavaScript developers have been advocating best practices that address this issue for some time. It seems 2006 was the year we sobered ourselves after binging on inaccessible scripting techniques. Many great articles were published bringing us back to our senses, preventing us from repeating our terrible development practices of the pre-standards 90′s. The resolution to the problem is to progressively enhance a web site that functions properly without JavaScript support.

Rob Cherney demonstrates how to progressively enhance an HTML form that will function with JavaScript turned off, and will be enhanced if JavaScript is available. I’ll demonstrate how to progressively enhance a text link that makes an Ajax call to the server. If JavaScript is enabled, the href attribute is disabled and Ajax will load content from another source into a div for display. If JavaScript is disabled, the hyperlink works as usual, and directs the browser to another page where the same content is viewable. A fancy interactive, animated interface created with DOM scripting could use this approach, and gracefully degrade to a typical multi-page site that search engine spiders would have no trouble crawling.

A hyperlink can be easily disabled with a “return false” event as is seen below.

[html]Have Your Cake and Eat It Too[/html]

The onclick event will call a function then return false, preventing the hyperlink from firing. This is a very simple demonstration of progressive enhancement in action, but we can do better still. A search engine spider would navigate to page.php where it could find more content to index, but in a real world implementation of this technique, it would be advisable to attach an event to the hyperlink unobtrusively from an external script rather than from an event handler that mixes behavior and structure. By assigning a class to the link and using JavaScript to find elements with this class name you can separate behavior and structure resulting in more maintainable code, and external code that can be cached or even skipped by search engine spiders resulting in faster parsing (spiders appreciate this). I’ll take the functionality a step further to display Ajax retrieved content in a div tag when the link is clicked.

[html]
Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

[/html]

[javascript]

[/javascript]

The id of the div is placed in the link tag using the rel attribute indicating the area to place the content returned by the loadContent() function. When attaching the click event to all hyperlinks with the class "progressive", the function also finds the id of the div where the Ajax content will display and passes it on the loadContent() function.

There is a caveat with the development of keyword density in a page; keywords must occur naturally in your content. Ad hoc stuffing of a page with your keywords will not necessarily be rewarded by intelligent search engine algorithms like Google’s, which will detect a dishonest stacking of the deck. Instead, you want to write copy for your site that incorporates the keywords you are targeting, but don’t get so focused on keywords that your SEO quest compromises the quality of the content.

Now that you know the importance of keywords, how do you select them and where do you place them in your pages? Fortunately there are some wonderful tools to help you choose keywords, and then evaluate the density in your pages. As for where to place the keywords, that can be solved with a simple list of priority areas that search engines value that will clue you into the hot places. A general rule of thumb when selecting keywords is target words that are as specific to your content as possible, and not already strongly controlled by major web competitors. For instance, if you tried to target the word “pottery”, chances are even with your best SEO efforts you will not out rank Pottery Barn, or the many other major businesses already targeting the term. Instead target a word like “raku”, which may be more relevant to your site content, and will result in visitors to your site with greater interest in what you have to offer. Though there may be fewer searches for this term, the visitors it does generate are more likely to make a purchase! An understanding of the Long Tail theory will further shed light on the subject.

The tools I use to research keywords are WordTracker.com, NicheBot.com, and Overture (now owned by Yahoo!). Each of these tools access global search data to see how often your keyword is searched for. Some will even tell you who else is targeting your keyword with paid advertising. You can get suggestions for related keywords or key phrases that may be more ideal to target. These tools are simple to use, and will tell you pretty definitively which words are going to give you the best results. I will say that there is a bit of science, and a bit of directed guess work that goes into keyword selection. After all, can we really predict what users will be searching for in the coming months? Not even with a crystal ball, but researching your keywords and phrases will get you a whole lot closer to success than blind guessing.

Once you have identified your keywords, you want to make sure they show up in the following priority one places on your pages:

• The title tag, close to the left but not the first word
• Heading tags such as h1, h2, and h3
• Meta tags, even though Google does not gauge these as a reliable source of finding out what your page is about, other search engines do
• In your URLs
• In internal and external link labels
• The first few lines of your page

You should also try to place your keywords and phrases in these locations:

• Alt text
• Title attribute text
• Strong and emphasis tags
• Other heading tags
• Longdesc text
• Summary attributes
• Caption tags
• In filename of CSS files or image files

Other general guidelines include:

• Keep HTML file size small, preferably below 20k
• Do not require JavaScript to navigate the site as search engine spiders won’t be able to spider all pages
• Use standards compliant HTML and CSS, and make all attempts to validate your pages as Section 508 or WCAG complaint
• Text should outweigh HTML
• Use an HTML template engine of some flavor as search engine spiders tend to skip over redundant HTML from page to page

This list is not exhaustive by any stretch, but it will certainly get you pointed in the right direction to success with search engine optimization. Once you have your keywords in place you can use a keyword density checker to evaluate your success.

WordPress users will be happy to know that an amazing Google Sitemap Generator plugin exists to create and submit your sitemap.xml to Google directly from your admin panel. Installation is simple, but a video tutorial has been created to walk your through the process should you get confused. The file it creates is also fine to submit to Yahoo! for indexing, making publicizing the structure of your site effortless.

• Whenever adding links to your posts, be sure to include keyword rich titles in the “Title” field. The same goes when adding images, where you will want to include both title and description. Think of the alternative as well as the common words people might use to search for the content you are posting.
• In your WordPress admin panel, go to Options > Permalinks, and change the permalink structure to be date and name based. By choosing this option, the URLs that link to each blog post will include the keywords in the title of the post. Search engines look at the URL of a page for keywords when assessing relevance to a user’s search, so this will boost your rankings on the keywords in the title of the post. Of course, you should think carefully when choosing the title for a post, considering the best keywords to use in the title. Don’t try to stuff all keywords in the title, though. Keep it natural as search engines look for this.
• Modify your WordPress template to create more search engine friendly title tags. The title tag is seen by search engines as an important place to find out what a page is about. By default, WordPress writes something like this in the title tag for a permalink page: Blog Name ¬ª Blog Archive. That’s not very descriptive. It would be better if it wrote the name of the post instead of “blog archive”. To modify this your WordPress blog has to be self installed, not hosted on the WordPress server. Find header.php in wp-content > themes > themename (themename is the name of the theme you wish to modify). Open the file in a text editor or Dreamweaver. Change the default:[php][/php] to [php][/php]

It goes without saying that if you are designing your own WordPress theme, be sure to use Web Standards and do your best to make your site Section 508 or WCAG Accessible. This alone will provide more meaningful ways for a search engine to find out what your site is about as your content will use semantic markup, and will have more content to index in alt, title, and longdesc attributes and many other places when design with Accessibility in mind. South By Southwest had a two part great panel discussion with experts on both Web Standards and SEO in 2006, which they released as podcasts.

Part 1: Web Standards and SEO: Searching for Common | Part 2: Web Standards and Search Engines: Searching