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Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond
Aarron Walter
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What’s This Book About?
- Practical, standards-based solutions to make your content more findable
- Findability concepts beyond just SEO stuff
- It’s a guide for people who want their message to reach their target audience (is that you?)
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The primary goals of findability are to help users …
- Find the websites they seek
- Find content they seek within websites
- Rediscover the valuable content they’ve found
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The Common Thread
- Keep an eye out for an ALA article on this subject soon.
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Findability Beyond SEO
- social networking
- microformats to make content portable
- search tools & user defined organization (tagging)
- RSS
- viral marketing
- email marketing
- quality content
- portable content is findable - put things where you'll find it again
- It's an iterative endeavor
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Findability & Web Standards Sitting in a Tree …
web standards + compelling content =
* findability bliss *
- Well written, keyword-rich, compelling content presented in a machine readable format will generate traffic to your site
- Web standards are the secret to making your content machine readable and portable
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The Web Standards Connection
- Semantic Markup is machine readable
- Microformats re-discoverable content, targeted search
- Progressive Enhancement removes search engine roadblocks (JavaScript, Ajax, Flash)
- Accessibility makes content legible for search engines
- Decreased code to content ratio can boost rankings
- Semantic Markup
- Using HTML tags and elements to communicate the information hierarchy and meaning of your content - not because of how they make your content look
- Microformats
- A standardized grouping of HTML tags and elements to best communicate the content marked up
- Progressive Enhancement
- A way to present a JavaScript/Flash dependent interface so that the content is still accessible to search engines, users with disabilities, and users on alternate devices.
- Accessibility
- Making a website useable by as many people as possible (disabled users, users on alternate devices) without modification.
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Semantic Markup Example: Image Replacement
<h1 id="logo" title="Fischer and Sons Funeral Home">
<span></span>Fischer and Sons Funeral Home
</h1>
#logo {width: 329px; height: 25px; position: relative; }
#logo span {
background: url(fischer-sons-funeral.gif) no-repeat;
position: absolute;
width: 100%; height: 100%; }
image replacement reference
- Marking up a logo to communicate a logical information hierarchy
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Progressive Enhancement: Clear the Roadblocks
Make content accessible when
JavaScript & Flash aren’t supported
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Content Should Be Accessible Without JavaScript
- JavaScript writes in expand/collapse links, which doesn't pollute keyword density
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Microformats
The ultimate in semantic markup
http://microformats.org
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Microformats: Put it where you can find it
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Accessibility: A More Complete Message
<acronym title="Web Content Accessibility Guidelines">
WCAG
</accronym>
<abbr title="Texas">TX</abbr>
Anticipate search behaviors
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Will I Get a Search Ranking Boost for Validating?
Nope
Standards promote best practices, but a validation badge isn't a backstage pass to the Google show.
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What Else Can I do to Make My Site More Findable?
- Tweak your server (custom error pages, search engine friendly URLs, optimize performance for indexing)
- Make your blog more findable (ping notification services, add tagging, circulate traffic)
- Write content that solves a problem, entertains, or generally serves the needs of your audience
- Add a search system to your site
- Set up a mailing list form and tie into an ESP API
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What Else Can I do to Make My Site More Findable?
- Watch your stats to discover findability problems and learn what content is most valuable to your audience
- Take advantage of the many free tools from Google and Yahoo! (Webmaster Central, Site Explorer)
- Build viral marketing tools
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Thanks for Your Time
