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

July 24, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: book review, Non-fiction, recommendation, SEO 

SEO is important. But there is more to getting traffic to your web pages than just SEO. You want people to be able to find your sites, partly via search engines. However, once there, you also want users to find the content of interest to them on your sites. To achieve this, you need to know how people Building Findable Websites, by Aarroon Walter use your site and to organize your site smartly. Furthermore, you want to encourage people to revisit your site, hopefully many times. And, if you also consider that over time you many want other sites and blogs to link to your sites – thus giving you extra traffic and at the same time increased ranking in the search engines – then it becomes clear that driving traffic entails much, much more than “just” SEO.

But the alternative approach – which more or less says that content is king and the answer to your prayers – will most likely not cut it either. The reason is that you need content people can find, you need traffic from search engines, you need content that is organized well so that the right content is easily available to as many users as possible, and you need a web site that is alive – where things happen, where new content is added – so that users have a reason to return.

Walter’s approach encompasses both SEO and the more content focused approach. Thus this is not another SEO book written for marketing professionals. Building Findable Websites is a book full of practical advice and examples for people who build websites aiming to reach their target audience. Chapters introduce best practices and fresh perspectives on how to accomplish the goals I outlined above in the first paragraph of this review.

The book discusses Web standards, accessibility, and technologies like Ajax, APIs, Flash, and microformats, focusing on the larger ideas behind these technologies. Aarron’s book shows you how a website built semantically using XHTML, CSS and javascript can make your web site findable for your users and for the search engines. . It emphasizes building attractive content first, then removing any roadblocks that would prevent search engines from finding it.

Building Findable Websites is an interesting blend of high-level strategy and low-level techie tools and techniques. It is a book that lays out a sound philosophy, provides tools consistent with that philosophy, and show how to use them. So it’s a useful book. It is also a very well-written book. Building Findable Websites is, to my mind, a very worthwhile read for anybody concerned with web site traffic!

Links to Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter at amazon US and amazon UK.

Tags: , , , ,