Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond

A Note from the Author

Added in 2026, about eighteen years after this book first shipped.

If you’ve landed here, you’re holding a time capsule. Building Findable Websites came out in 2008, and this companion site has been preserved just as it was: same pages, same downloads, same links. I’ve kept it online because the big ideas have aged well, and because I believe in keeping an archive alive for the readers still referencing this material.

The Web moved fast, though. So before you take any of the specific, hands-on advice as current, here is a map of what is still true and what has changed since.

What still holds up

The big ideas are the part I’m proudest of, and most of them are as true today as they were in 2008:

• Findability serves people as much as search engines. When you make your work easier to find, you make it better for everyone. That still holds.
• Quality content wins. Black-hat tricks still get you penalized, and search engines have only gotten better at spotting them.
• Semantic, accessible, standards-based markup is still the foundation. Clean HTML, a clear content hierarchy, real alt text, meaningful URLs: all still core.
• Fast pages and great content still rise. The vocabulary changed (we now say “Core Web Vitals”), but “loads quickly so it can be indexed efficiently” is the same gospel.

What’s changed

Plenty of the specifics in these chapters are now history. A few of the big ones:

• Structured data moved on. The microformats I championed for marking up contact info and events (hCard, hCalendar, hReview) were largely supplanted for search by Schema.org, usually written as JSON-LD. Microformats live on (rel="me" now verifies Mastodon profiles, and microformats2 powers the IndieWeb), but if you are marking up for Google today, start with Schema.org.
• Flash is gone. “Findable Flash” was solid advice in 2008. Then Steve Jobs published his open letter Thoughts on Flash in 2010, and Adobe discontinued Flash for good at the end of 2020. The progressive-enhancement thinking behind that chapter still holds, just not for Flash.
• Mobile and HTTPS rewrote the rules. This book predates the smartphone era, mobile-first indexing, and HTTPS everywhere. All three are table stakes for findability now.
• Most of the tools have shut down. Many of the utilities, galleries, and services linked throughout, especially on the Resources page, have gone dark in the years since. Treat those links as a historical snapshot, not a shopping list.

The downloads still work

The bonus chapters, code samples, and checklist are all still here and intact; grab them from the Bonus Chapters and Code pages. It is the outbound links to third-party tools that have aged, so expect a fair number of dead ends. That is the nature of an old resource list, and I have left it as-is rather than rewrite history.

Still findable, after all these years

There’s a line near the end of this book I still believe: no one publishes a website hoping to remain an unnoticed voice among the many. That is exactly why this archive is still here, and still findable.

If the book meant something to you, thank you. I’d love to hear from you: aarron at aarronwalter dot com.

Aarron Walter