Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond (Paperback)

[caption id="attachment_462" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Buildin Findable Websites: Web standards SEO and Beyond"]Buildin Findable Websites: Web standards SEO and Beyond[/caption] Product Description 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 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. Reviews SEO the right way by Brian Artka The big buzz phrase for the past few years has been Search Engine Optimization(SEO). Companies are paying other companies millions of dollars to get, and keep their websites in the front of different keyword searches on the larger search engine sites. Is it worth it? In most cases... probably not. Anyone thinking about paying money to have someone make their site "SEO" friendly should read Building Findable Websites. Being a web standards practitioner, I had great theories of how building a website the right way can take care of most of your SEO woes. After reading Aarron's book on the topic, my theories were solidified. having a website that is built semantically using XHTML, CSS and javascript will drastically make your web presence findable for your users and for the search engines. Is your website still wrangling a table based layout with messy unreadable code? Before spending thousands on SEO enhancements, read this book. See what the buzz of Web Standards is about(if you have not already) and go from there; you will not be disappointed. Not an SEO book by Ron Mertens I'm not so happy with this book. The idea is good - talking about 'Findability', which is more than SEO. He defines the findability of a web site as

* the way to attract visitors (who can find you on search engines)
* the way people find content on your site
* making people return to your site

My main problem is that I wanted an SEO book, and there's not much SEO discussions in it... I would have wanted more (maybe my fault - I should have got a real SEO book). Another thing is that there are some code example in the book that are quite irrelevant. For example he devotes many pages to build an Ajax search engine in your site, or building a mailing list... but this book is not about coding, so I think it's just a way to write more pages. So it might be a good book to start and learn about SEO plus get some more tips on writing blogs and sites. But if you want a book dedicated for SEO, look for something else (I know I will - and I'll update you when I find something).