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Introducing Findability

You’ve heard of SEO, but have you heard of findability?

You may have designed an exceptionally creative website, written compelling content, or developed a useful Web application. But if your work cannot be located by your target audience, it’s all for naught. After all, we can’t appreciate what we can’t find.

What Is Findability?

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, can help people find that brilliant website you’ve created. Although you can certainly manipulate your code and your content to increase your chances of receiving traffic from search engines, there are other ways to direct traffic to a site. With millions of pages on the Web, contemporary websites need to help users find content using as many methods as possible. Findability is the broader discipline that unites all strategies to help your audience find what they seek.

In his 2005 book Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become, Peter Morville popularized the term findability, defining it as:

“The quality of being located or navigated, the degree to which an object or piece of data can be located, and the degree to which a system supports navigation and retrieval.”

Morville’s definition may spark associations with information architecture, usability, and search engine optimization. Although all of these disciplines play important roles, findability can actually be found throughout the Web project lifecycle, creating a common thread that can unite every facet of the Web planning, design, and development process and all team members involved.

As shown in FIGURE 1.1, findability is present in

Figure 1.1 Findability bleeds into all sub-disciplines of the Web industry.

Information architecture

Development

Marketing

Copywriting

Design

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Accessibility

Usability

We discover findability in all of the major disciplines that make up the Web. So often freelancers and members of smaller Web teams end up wearing a number of different hats—doing the work of an information architect, designer, developer, and more. Whether you find yourself handling strictly Web development or being the jack-of-all-trades on projects, it’s important to think about findability at every step of the way so you can ensure the success of your site for both users and the client.

The Development Side of Findability

As developers, we have three primary goals in making websites findable:

1. Help people find your website.

2. Help people find what they are looking for once they arrive at your site.

3. Bring your audience back to your website.

Developers can make a tremendous impact on the findability of a website. The way a site is built is one of the most significant factors in how it draws search engine traffic, and keeps people browsing longer. How we write our markup, set up the server, and integrate content—and the plethora of powerful tools we are able to leverage or build—can bring in volumes of traffic and help users find exactly what they’re looking for once they’ve arrived at the site.

Traditionally, findability has been the domain of marketing experts and information architects, both of whom have a lot to contribute to the initiative. But, if developers are not informed and involved in the findability process, many opportunities to make the site successful can and will be overlooked. Simple missteps in coding alone make a site less visible or completely invisible to search engines.

It’s the developer’s job to keep his team aware of best practices and emerging technologies that could help make a site more findable. Accessibility, Web standards, microformats, search systems, RSS feeds, XML sitemaps, and APIs are all powerful tools that only a developer is likely to be aware of and understand their benefits to a project. The goal of this book is to provide a broad range of strategies, tools, and examples that will get you up to speed on how you can make sure that any site you build will be findable.

The Deepest Desires of Search Engines

SEO is an important part of the many strategies we’ll explore in this book to promote findability. The success of SEO depends on your understanding of what search engines like. In no particular order, here are a few important things to keep in mind as you develop sites.

Search engines like

Content that is naturally keyword rich (not stuffed) and valuable to readers

Content that is visible to search engine spiders with no barriers that may prevent a full indexing of pages

Content that communicates a clear information hierarchy so spiders can understand what the page is about

Content that loads quickly so spiders can index it efficiently

Links to your site from reputable sources so they can determine the reputation of your site

Honest content that isn’t trying to trick the search engine

More content than code to mark up the page

Clean, meaningful URLs with keywords in them if possible

Domains that have been around for a while

There’s a lot of logic in what the search engines are asking of us. They just want us to give them plenty of honest, high quality content in a format that they can read. As we move towards this goal, we are going to reap additional benefits, too.

For example, following accessibility standards not only broadens your audience to include users with disabilities and those on alternate devices (such as handhelds), it will also promote search engine optimization. Content in alt and title attributes—to name just a couple of elements that promote accessibility—provides more context and relevance for a search engine to understand what a page is about and can more accurately connect searchers with your page. Best practices for findability and accessibility often overlap.

People and search engines both appreciate great content. When people find useful content on a website, they tend to evangelize—creating links on their blog, links on user-generated news sites, and even discussing your content on discussion boards. Those inbound links to your site not only bring other people to your site, they boost your reputation with search engines. Search engines evaluate the reputation of a site based upon how many other reputable sites link to it. This means that when you provide your users with good content, you are also improving the findability of your site.

In his book Designing with Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman brilliantly outlines the many benefits users, businesses, and developers enjoy by following Web standards. Web standards development practices also provide great findability benefits by improving search engine optimization:

They help you avoid code errors that could prevent search engines from understanding your content.

They promote the practice of marking up your content in a semantically meaningful way (which search engines will better understand).

They help reduce the volume of code required to deliver your content, creating a better content-to-code ratio and faster indexing.

They foster best practices in coding that allow external code files to cache in the browser, speeding up the load time.

As we will see, Web standards—though not a silver bullet—are a great ally in our findability endeavors.

Accessibility, great content, and Web standards are just a fraction of the findability strategies we’ll explore in this book. The common theme we’ll discover along the way is that findability serves people as much as it serves search engines. When you improve findability, you improve the user experience.

Beyond Search Engine Optimization

Though SEO is essential to any findable site, there is still a lot more that is required in order to achieve the three primary goals previously mentioned. You can use viral marketing tools and mailing lists to drive traffic to the site. You can promote your site on popular design gallery sites, social networking platforms, and directories. Aside from driving traffic to a website, you can use search systems, sitemaps, and custom 404 pages to help your users find what they are looking for within your site. It’s also important to analyze user behavior on the site so you can identify findability pitfalls. Many strategies must work in concert to make a site more findable.

It’s important to note that findability is iterative. Vigilance and regular changes are required to dial in each piece of the puzzle to serve the common goals.

Get Your Team on Board from the Start

As we’ve seen already, there’s a lot that you can do as a developer to make your site findable, but it doesn’t rest entirely on your shoulders. It’s important to make sure all of your team understands the value of findability and how they can contribute. If you are an independent freelancer doing the work of all or most of the members of a Web team, you probably don’t have to lobby anyone to do their part. If you work in a firm, however, chances are you’ll need to rally the troops. Here’s how you might outline each team member’s role in the find-ability initiative:

A Project Manager should speak to the client about the benefits of findability. It will make the client’s site more successful and could potentially be a value-added service offered, which could make projects more profitable. Make sure findability is a priority for all team members.

An Information Architect should research user search behaviors and keywords relevant to the site’s content. Be sure to name sections of the site with these keywords in order to drive search traffic. Create and share a keyword master list with the marketing specialist and copywriter so online advertisements and the site’s content can feature the targeted terms. Consider including a site-wide search to assist users in finding what they want. What additional content could be added to the site (such as link libraries, case studies, or articles) that will drive more traffic? A folksonomy, or user-based tagging system of content, could be a powerful way of organizing site content that better matches users’ search behaviors. The tags that users create might also serve as a tool to identify valuable target keywords that might have been overlooked by initial research.

A Designer should design pages that highlight search fields and mailing-list signup fields. High-quality design establishes credibility and increases the chances that users will stay once they’ve found the site. Great design can be showcased in popular online design galleries and competitions, which can drive thousands of visits daily. Make sure your designs show people where to look so they don’t miss important content that is provided.

A Copywriter should ensure content includes target keywords that flow naturally. In other words, if keywords show up too often, search engines will think that the copy has been stuffed with terms in a dishonest effort to improve page rankings. Keyword density is the frequency of a keyword in a page. It’s considered natural if the keyword density is seven percent or lower. Keywords should be included in the copy, but only where they would naturally fit. Search engine penalties are simply too great to risk stuffing content with keywords.

Usability Experts test and improve the usability of the site, which helps ensure users will find what they are looking for—which is a huge boon to find-ability. They should also evaluate how easy it is to find the site via search engines and check page rankings on target keywords. Traffic analysis tools can also provide very detailed information about user behavior on the website. Usability experts should use these tools to identify where people are getting lost, how long they are staying on particular pages, and how well the site design supports findability. Traffic analysis tools can provide valuable information that helps improve findability long after the launch of a site.

It’s important that you share with your peers what you can do as a developer to build the site to be as findable as possible.

In short, findability should be on your mind throughout the planning, design, and development processes. Attempting to retrofit a completed site to be more findable is challenging and often yields poor results.

A common approach many large organizations take when building a major website is to plan and build the project, then have a search engine optimization company come in at the end and try to address a single aspect of making the site findable—often with little control over code, design, copywriting, usability, or content organization. Although certain things can be done to improve a site’s findability after it has been built, you will find the job much easier and more effective if it is integrated into your process from the beginning. You’ll likely find it considerably more cost effective, too, because you’ll be leveraging in-house resources and talent rather than farming out the job to an expensive SEO company.

Once your team becomes educated on what they can do to help make the project more findable for your target audience, they will probably be very motivated to implement strategies. Everyone wants their work to be recognized and found to be useful, so they are likely to jump on board and do what they can to make the site successful.

Of course, clients will love you all the more if you have implemented a findability strategy into your process that helps them reach more people. By tracking the success of your findability plan, you can offer your clients concrete information about how broadly their message is being received and what kind of return they are getting on their investment. Selling your clients on findability is as simple as speaking to their bottom line!

Using Your Moral Compass To Guide Your Way

One central point that is hopefully crystal clear in this book is that findability should never be implemented at the detriment to the trust, privacy, or comfort of your audience. As you are implementing your findability strategy in your projects, always ask yourself:

“How would I feel if I were on the receiving end of this message?”

If your answer is anything but 100 percent positive, then you should rethink what you are doing.

If you’ve ever run or read a blog, chances are you’ve seen a lot of comment spam. SEO spammers often pollute blog comments with unrelated text simply so they can create a link from your site to theirs in order to boost their traffic and page ranking. In the process, they do a good job of annoying readers and the person running the blog. How would these spammers feel if we all went to their blogs and returned the favor? In their frenzy to improve the findability of their site, spammers compromise their reputation and the trust of users.

Treating your audience respectfully will help you stand out from the crowd every time. It will bring your audience back to your website as well as create evangelists who will pass on your message for you. This is far too powerful an asset to your organization to jeopardize your audience’s trust by incessantly emailing them, tricking them into visiting your site using black hat SEO tricks, causing elements on a page to blink to solicit attention, or implementing any other technique that is less than honest.

Don’t forget that search engines are an important part of your audience as well. They too will not appreciate being duped. If you are caught using black hat techniques like stuffing your pages with keywords, or cloaking text by setting it in the same color as the background, you could be banned from search results indefinitely. A notable example is the German BMW site, which was blacklisted by Google in February 2006 for using black hat SEO techniques. Being banned from a major search engine can crush online businesses.