Building Findable Websites

Analyzing Your Traffic, and Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid. Overall, Building Findable Websites lays out an excellent collection of tools, tips, and strategies for making websites findable, and the author follows up by providing the code and other tools you'll need to follow his guidance. Anyone serious about getting their website found by the bots should give these approaches some thought, because the battle for eyeballs on the web, as any arms race, requires constant innovation.

Often times, the term SEO is mentioned in derogatory terms. With many of the poor techniques people use to garner site traffic, it's not hard to see why. However, Aaron Walter has recently finished a book entitled Building Findable Websites which casts a wide net on the concept of building a quality web site that goes well beyond just the mere topic of SEO.

The concept of "findable websites" may be familiar if you recently read Aaron's article in A List Apart, entitled Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry. In the article, Mr. Walter talks of three very important things that a site needs to accomplish, helping people:

* find the web sites they seek,
* find the content on the site, and
* rediscover valuable content they've found.

The book covers plenty of topics including SEO, microformats, and integrating third-party APIs like Google Search. The supporting site also has plenty of supporting content including five additional chapters.

Much of the content is geared heavily to content producers, like bloggers. The book tries to be very inclusive with its target audience, being high level enough for managers while having enough technical tidbits for implementers.

If it sounds like I'm a little biased, I probably am. Aaron Walter asked me to provide the technical editing for the book, which I was pleased to have the opportunity to do so. Aaron's writing is comfortable and straightforward and it was fun working with Aaron on the book. I really enjoyed reading the book and working with Aaron to make sure the technical examples in the book were accurate and included best practice approaches.