Last night I went to the WSG London Findability event at Westminster University, part of London Web Week; here's part two of my notes.
Stuart Colville's session on 'Building websites with findability in mind' was full of useful, practical advice.
Who needs to find your content?
Basic requirements:
Understand potential audience(s)
Content
Semantic markup
Accessibility (for people and user agents)
Search engine friendly
Content [largely about blogs]:
Make it compelling for your audience
There's less competition in niche subjects
Originality (synthesising content, or representing existing content in new ways is also good)
Stay on topic
Provide free, useful information or tools
Comments and discussion (from readers, and interactions with readers) are good
Tagging:
Author or user-generated, or both
Good for searching
Replaces fixed categories
Enables arbitrary associations
Rich
Markup (how to make content more findable):
Use web standards. They're not a magic fix but they'll put you way ahead. The content:code ratio is improved, and errors are reduced.
Use semantic markup. Adds meaning to content.
Try the roundabout SEO test
Make your sites accessible. Accessible content is indexable content.
Markup meta:
Keywords versus descriptions. Tailor descriptions for each page; they can be automatically generated; they can be used as summaries in search results.
WordPress has good plugins – metadescription for auto-generated metadata, there are others for manual metadata.
Markup titles and headings:
Make them good – they'll appear as bookmark etc titles.
One H1 per page; the most meaningful title for that page
Separate look from heading structure.
Markup text:
Use semantically correct elements to describe content. Strong, em, etc.
Markup imagery:
Background images are fine if they're only a design element.
Use image replacement if the images have meaning. There are some accessibility issues.
Use attributes correctly, and make sure they're relevant.
Markup microformats:
Microformats are a simple layer of structure around content
They're easy to add to your site
Yahoo! search and technorati index them, Firefox 3 will increase exposure.
Markup Javascript:
Start unobtrusive and enhance according to the capabilities of the user agent.
Don't be stupid. Use onClick, don't kill href (e.g. href="#").
Use event delegation – no inline events. It's search engine accessible, has nice clean markup and you still get all the functionality.
[Don't break links! I like opening a bunch of search results in new tabs, and I can't do that on your online catalogue, I'll shop somewhere I can. Rant over.]
Performance and indexation:
Use 'last modified' headers – concentrate search agents on fresh content
Sites with Google Ads are indexed more often.
URLs:
Hackable URLs are good [yay!].
Avoid query strings, they won't be indexed
Put keywords in your URL path
Use mod_rewrite, etc.
URI permanence:
"They should be forever". But you need to think about them so they can be forever even if you change your mind about implementation or content structure.
Use rewrites if you do change them.
De-indexing (if you've moved content)
Put up a 404 page with proper http headers. 410 'intentionally gone' is nice.
There's a tool on Google to quickly de-index content.
Make 404s useful to users – e.g. run an internal search and display likely results from your site based on their search engine keywords [or previous page title].
Robots.txt – really good but use carefully. Robots-Nocontent – Yahoo! introduced 'don't index' for e.g. divs but it hasn't caught on.
Moving content:
Use 301. Redirect users and get content re-indexed by search engines.
Tools for analysing your findability:
Google webmaster tools, Google analytics, log files. It's worth doing, check for broken links etc.
Summary:
Think about findability before you write a line of code.
Start with good content, then semantic markup and accessibility.
Use sensible headings, titles, links.