Building Findable Websites
by Aarron Walters, Art Institute of Atlanta.
Whatever your role on the web team, findability is your objective. Semantic markup, microformats, user tagging, rss, viral marketing are other important elements. Content is still king. Combining Web Standards and contextual content equals findability bliss.
The book covers how to help search engines understand your content better. He mentions a Firefox tool to view microformats. See [www.microformats.org](http://www.microformats.org/). [Aside: Tantek had a great panel on this at SXSW 2006.]
Accessibility is important but let’s not forget it should also work for search engines. Cleanly coded sites get indexed faster. A high content to code ratio is recommended.
Remember not to rely on JavaScript to show more content as some users may have JavaScript turned off.
Firefox 3 is going to support microformats.
Page titles should be in header tags. (this is why I get annoyed with vendors who code only for visual effects and don’t use h1, etc. Why pay a bomb for SEM when your site is inherently unsemantic and unfindable?)
You can use ‘acronym’ and ‘abbr’ tags so that people searching for ‘Texas’ will find info listed as ‘TX’.
My verdict: Good stuff with a view to building for future technologies.