Review by Allen Stenger for Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond
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This well-written and informative book on getting your web site noticed by users boils the advice down to one sentence: “Your content should always be written for humans first, and search engines second!” It emphasizes building attractive content first, then removing any roadblocks that would prevent search engines from finding it.

The book is an interesting blend of high-level strategy and low-level techie tools and techniques. The mostly likely audience is actually webmasters more than web designers or marketers, although all would benefit from it. The most valuable part for me was the review of the many management tools, most of them free, available for studying your web site.

The web standards part doesn’t really get a lot of attention in this book. No one today is going to seriously argue against following web standards. The advice in this book is limited to “use HTML elements for what they were designed for,” with a promise that that will improve your search rankings. For example, it recommends using the various header levels to structure your document instead of just using boldface and bigger type, and it recommends using tables only for tabular date and using CSS for precise placement of a mosaic of elements.

A lot of what’s here is not really about findability but about making your site worth finding, and about how to hold on to your audience once they’ve found the site. It covers techniques such as mailing lists (old technology but still very valuable), RSS feeds, user-generated content (such as product reviews), and blogs. The book makes the interesting point that authoring for search engines is very similar to authoring for the visually impaired. If you are careful to make your site accessible to humans, it will automatically be more accessible to search engines. There is specific advice on handling blogs, JavaScript menu systems, Shockwave Flash, and Ajax.

Review by Brian Artka for Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond
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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.

Review by Jeffrey Scott for Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond
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Mr. Walter has done an outstanding job giving the reader not only a solid overview of many different aspects of SEO, but also delving into actual code and its various details. He discusses optimizing one’s code for the search engines, giving numerous examples for the reader. He discusses the importance of separating content from presentation (CSS) and behavior (JavaScript). Mr. Walter sprinkles some PHP code throughout the book, too; however, he does an excellent job telling the reader what he’s doing – where – and why, with plenty of comments to support his coding.

Additionally, he discusses the importance of blogging and adding local search to one’s Web site(s). Blogging is clearly important to SEO due to the consistent blog posts as well as the linking strategy (to and from the Web site) that complements any blog.

He finishes his fine tome with a chapter on preventing Findability roadblocks – such as using too much Flash and avoiding JavaScript & AJAX issues – as well as a discussion on integrating an email newsletter service (e.g. MailChimp) into your Web site. All quite helpful to any Web designer.

Mr. Walter provides numerous illustrations throughout the text and explains them thoroughly. He is clearly an exceptional teacher, very practical in both his design and his prose; It’s probably fair to guess that his teaching style matches his writing style.

This is an enjoyable and enlightened book for both Web designers and Web marketers. I highly recommend ‘Building Findable Websites.’