9
Putting Findability Into Practice

Now that you’ve got a host of findability techniques in your toolbox how will you assemble them into a cohesive strategy? By creating a prioritized list you can devise a clear path to findability bliss.

Each of the findability techniques introduced in this book addresses one or more of these primary goals:

Help people find your website.

Once your audience arrives, help them find what they seek on your site.

Encourage return visits to your site.

You could certainly apply all of these techniques to every project, but one size does not fit all in the Web industry. You’ll need to evaluate each project’s unique goals and devise a findability game plan that will work best to reach the audience you’re targeting.

Prioritizing each technique into a multi-tiered strategy will also help you remain focused on the things that will have the most significant impact on the findability of your site.

A Prioritized Approach

Since each project’s scale, goals, and audience are different, your findability strategy will need to adapt accordingly. You will find there are a few findability techniques that can serve the needs of every project, while others aren’t always a good fit.

It’s a good idea to define a multi-tiered priority list of techniques to develop an overarching strategy to reach your target audience. Although you’ll need to define a strategy that works best for your site, here’s an abbreviated example of how you might define your priorities.

Priority 1

Create well-written, original content that fills a niche and is relevant to your audience.

Research target keywords and place them in strategic locations within your markup (keyword density should not exceed seven percent).

Use semantic, standards compliant code.

Meet accessibility guidelines to ensure content is legible to search engines.

Create predictable, search engine friendly URLs.

Create inbound links where possible and promote your site on other sites.

Publish robots.txt and sitemap.xml, then notify major search engines of your sitemap file (see the bonus chapter entitled “Free Search Services” on the companion site http://buildingfindablewebsites.com for info on creating sitemap.xml files).

Create custom 404 pages to get users back on track.

Create an HTML sitemap page to help users and search engines navigate your site.

Ensure JavaScript, and Flash content do not present roadblocks to search engine indexing.

Diligently analyze your traffic for successes and failures (see the bonus chapter entitled “Analyzing Your Traffic” on the companion site http://buildingfindablewebsites.com).

Priority 2

Add a local search engine to your site.

Use microformats to make content such as events and contact info portable.

Create a blog that notifies major ping services of new content.

Syndicate content with RSS feeds where possible.

Promote viral exchanges of your content (see the bonus chapter entitled “Viral Marketing” on the companion site http://buildingfindablewebsites.com).

Optimize site performance for efficient indexing.

Priority 3

Build and utilize a mailing list.

Consider creating a Google AdWords campaign to create immediate traffic.

Promote your site offline with print, television, and radio advertising (see the bonus chapter entitled “Places to Promote Your Site” on the companion site http://buildingfindablewebsites.com).

Discovering Problems on Your Site

After building your site to be findable, it’s prudent to run a few tests to confirm it’s as findable and search engine friendly as you think it is. Fortunately, there are some very helpful tools that simplify the testing process.

Sitening SEO Tools

Sitening—a search engine marketing and Internet strategy company based in Nashville, Tennessee—has a suite of powerful tools (http://sitening.com/seo-tools/) that can provide insight into the findability of your site. Use the SEO Analyzer tool to evaluate your search engine optimization efforts. The SEO Analyzer provides coding advice from an enlightened Web standards perspective, and displays your site in a text-only browser so you can get a sense of what search engines will see when indexing your site.

The Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP) tracker will watch all keywords you’ve targeted and let you know how you rank on the major search engines.

The Backlink Analyzer creates a quick view list of all sites that are currently linking to your site.

Spam Detector

As the name suggests, the spam detector (http://tool.motoricerca.info/spam-detector/) evaluates your site for spammy-looking techniques that could potentially cause search engines to penalize your rankings.

Semantics Extractor

The W3C has a nice semantics extractor (http://www.w3.org/2003/12/semantic-extractor.html) that evaluates your markup to show you how well you’re communicating the information hierarchy of your page. When you run the semantics extractor you should see the keywords you’re targeting and the root of your message visible in the results.

Keyword Priority and Density Evaluation

Be sure to evaluate your pages to discern their keyword density and keyword priority using the handy tools at http://www.ranks.nl/cgi-bin/ranksnl/spider/spider.cgi. Keyword priority should be high, but density should not exceed seven percent or it runs the risk of looking like the page has been dishonestly stuffed with keywords.

Watch Your Stats

Of course, you can also spot all sorts of problems by keeping a close eye on your statistics. Be sure to analyze your traffic stats on a regular basis so you can make immediate changes when problems are discovered.

When Will You See Results?

After investing much time and effort to make your sites more findable, you’ll probably be anxious to see some results. You’ll see improved traffic at different times depending on the techniques you’re employing.

The time it takes to achieve top search rankings with target keywords depends on how stiff the competition is, how often people search for the target terms, and how well you’ve optimized your pages to highlight those terms. If you’re competing against very popular sites for your keywords it could take a long time to raise your site’s credibility in the eyes of the major search engines to outrank your competition.

Search engines will often index a site within approximately a week after being notified of the location of a sitemap.xml file. Once your site is indexed you may begin to see some referral traffic from search engines, with volume increasing over time as your ranking improves.

As your domain name ages you’ll see improved rankings. Of course, more inbound links to your site from reputable sources will cause the biggest boost in your rankings and create immediate referral traffic as well.

One of the best ways to get immediate traffic results is to set up a blog, write often about topics of interest to your audience, and configure your blog software to notify all major ping services when you publish. Because search engines index blogs often, and services like Technorati (http://technorati.com help users keep tabs on the blogosphere, blogging is one of the most immediate ways to reach your audience.

If your budget can accommodate, consider creating a Google AdWords (http://adwords.google.com) campaign after launching your site to generate immediate traffic. It’s not the best fit for all situations, but for commercial websites it can jump start traffic and sales.

If you’re providing exceptionally good content as Chapter 4 advises and implementing a comprehensive findability strategy, the word will get out about your site and your traffic will increase.

There’s no short answer as to when you can expect to see the fruits of your findability labors. If you plan and build your sites intelligently from the start then continue to evaluate and improve their findability, you can bank on greatly improving your traffic and reaching a much larger segment of your target audience.

Final Notes: The Day Findability Saved the World

There are millions of websites vying for our attention like a cacophony of raised voices in which few are heard. If you hope to rise above the noise so your voice can be heard, you need to communicate more intelligently.

It’s self-apparent that by improving findability you can make your business or your clients’ businesses more successful, and you certainly can broadcast a message to a larger audience. These are the easy-to-comprehend, compelling truths of the value of findability in our projects, which can serve our immediate, individual needs.

I’d like to leave you with a story of how findability has already changed our world, and could someday do even more if we strive for distant long-term dividends as fervently as we seek the immediate short-term returns.

The Global Public Health Intelligence Network—GPHIN for short (http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/media/nr-rp/2004/2004_gphin-rmispbk_e.html), created by the Public Health Agency of Canada—monitors select areas of the Web for early signs and symptoms of dangerous epidemics that could wipe out humanity. It works like a search engine, crawling and cataloging data in order to identify signs of potential pandemics early so health authorities can quarantine and stop them from spreading.

If you’ve kept abreast of current events in recent years perhaps you recall the very scary news reports of the outbreak of the SARS virus (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in 2002 and 2003 in China. It was a very aggressive virus that threatened to spread across the globe and kill millions if it weren’t discovered very early by GPHIN.

By crawling important sites on the Web, GPHIN was able to detect SARS three months before the World Health Organization announced it. The world escaped this brush with death because the early warning signs of the pandemic hidden in public content on the Web were findable by a software application. It’s very unlikely that humans could have spotted the pattern of symptoms quite so fast. GPHIN’s early detection led to an early response that squashed the outbreak and saved millions of lives.

Imagine how broader adoption of Web standards, microformats, and other findability techniques could dramatically improve GPHIN’s ability to more intelligently index and find meaning in content published on the Web to immediately spot epidemics that threaten our survival. We empower our software to solve complex problems that are beyond our scope of vision when we publish our content using standards compliant, accessible, and findable practices.

GPHIN is just one of many Web crawlers that we need to communicate with more effectively. Whether we’re searching for products or pandemics, findable content improves our Web user experience and our world. Although the content you’re publishing might not help eradicate the next global disease, the stakes are still high for our websites.

No one publishes a website hoping to remain an unnoticed voice among the many. Obscurity won’t do for our content, our clients’ content, and for the future of our Web. It’s time to integrate findability best practices into our project lifecycle and build all of our websites to be found.