This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

This is not another SEO book written for marketing professionals.  Between these covers you’ll find practical advice and examples for people who build websites aiming to reach their target audience. Each chapter will introduce you to best practices and fresh perspectives on how to accomplish these simple, yet indispensable goals:

• Help more people find your site

• Help users find content within your site

• Encourage return visits

The path this book travels passes through the villages of Web standards, accessibility, and contemporary technologies like Ajax, APIs, Flash, and microformats. You’ll find the big ideas behind these technologies and real world examples, illustrating that you don’t have to compromise the user experience to create search engine friendly, findable websites.

Although this book illuminates a broad range of findability strategies, one common theme pervades:
Web standards + compelling content = improved findability = more successful sites

You’ll find even more findability guidance on the book’s companion website (http://buildingfindablewebsites.com) including 5 bonus chapters.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 26 Ratings

Excellent book full of practical, usable advice - 2009-09-23
Reviewer Rating:
Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond by Aaron Walter is the best web development book I've read in a long time. It is densely packed with actionable advice for improving the "findability" of your site, and in so doing, improve the usability, readability, speed, and manageability of your site. Findability is a broader concept than simply SEO. It is helping people find your site, helping people navigate your site and retrieve the information/action they want from it, and encouraging people to return to your site.

Walter covers a wide range of areas you can work on to improve the findability of your site, from the importance of quality content with strategically placed keywords, using semantic markup with clear hierarchies, server-side strategies such as friendly urls, rss and email subscriptions, etc.

I heartily recommend this book to not just web designers and developers, but also website owners and managers and web content writers.

Complete Resource - 2009-08-10
Reviewer Rating:
This book has it all, from the simplest principles and basic practices to more complicated techniques. The author thoroughly explores what it takes to attract web visitors, and keep them coming back. He includes plenty of concrete examples of what to do, links to resources on the web, and so forth. This book should benefit any website owner, from the small business or individual, to the largest organization. A couple nice extras: More chapters, to supplement the book, and freely available on the book's companion website; and code for some of the examples in the book, also on the website.

If you own a web site, or you're planning one, get this book. It's essential reading!

This is a valuable guide for anyone developing websites. - 2009-07-30
Reviewer Rating:
This book describes in great detail a list of potential pitfalls and best practices for creating content that is not only easier for users to find, but to the search engines as well. Numerous HTML, CSS, Javascript, .htaccess, and PHP examples are given and thoroughly explained. I found this book to be easy to read and yet very informative, especially when it pointed out design choices I had been making that were in fact hurting search engine rankings.

A must have book for web designers - 2009-05-10
Reviewer Rating:
I have always wanted to know more about SEO tips and strategies - but this book completely flips that thought on its head. Findable websites do not just try to optimize for search engines but are accessible, usable; and value informative, pertinent content before anything else. There are lots of tips and tricks for people who like them and also insights into how to use Google Analytics (or other web statistics software) for tweaking your design based on the implicit feedback of the users (actions users take on your web page).

I find this book standing in stark contrast to most other "SEO" books, in that it actually clearly states what it takes to build findable websites without resorting to jargon or marketing gimmicks.

I hope Aarron Walter would write more books for web designers!

Excellent Resource - Really Easy To Understand - 2009-04-29
Reviewer Rating:
When I first ordered this book my developers and I had created a large website and application, and been running the site for almost a year. Over twelve months we had not received a page rank and did not show up in any search results for our keywords. We were freaking out. We knew a lot about development and nothing about SEO.
I found Aaron's book on Amazon and read it in about two days. Then I spent a month implementing all the changes. Within weeks we had a Google page rank and we were starting to show up in search results.
The book does a good job of separating Web Standards and SEO. They are distinct and important to understand the difference. I continue to reference this book and find more little valuable tweaks to make on the site. The book also helped me to gain a foundation for SEO and web standards so I could read other material and understand it better.

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