Findability

Examination Questions

Define the term "findability", and describe its relationship to SEO, usability, information architecture, and accessibility.
Define the term "folksonomy" and describe its findability benefits.
Explain why findability should be considered throughout the project lifecycle rather than at the end of a project.
List the three primary goals of findability.
Why is it important to et your moral compass guide your way when implementing findability strategies?
Define the terms "Black Hat SEO" and "White Hat SEO".
What is a SERP?

List 4 benefits of using web standards when building your websites.
List 4 important (X)HTML tags that can play a significant role in communicating content prominence to search engines.
Describe how the use of web standards best practices can improve SEO.
Describe the role of meta tags (description, keywords, robots, author, geo) in making a web page optimized for search engines.
List and describe black hat SEO techniques that should be avoided to prevent getting black listed from search engine indexes.
List and describe methods to prevent search engines from indexing certain content.
Describe how frames, popup windows, deprecated markup, images maps and coding errors can present challenges for search engine spiders.
Will search engines give a website a boost in rankings if it passes W3C validation? Explain.
Do search engines penalize websites that use image replacement techniques? Explain.
Explain how you might make text in an image visible to search engines.
How might a table coded for accessibility improve content findability?
Explain how content in a <title> tag should be organized to foster findability, and usability.
Why is content in the <title> tag critical to reading your web analytics?

Define the term microformat.
Describe a use case in which microformats would help improve findability and the user experience.
How might a user identify microformat content on a web page?
What major websites publish content in microformats?
Describe how you might make hCard or hCalendar microformat content downloadable to an address book or calendar application respectively.
Which search engines currently recognize microformats?
How can the rel-tag microformat be used to improve content findability?

Describe best practices in file and directory naming to improve SEO.
How might a domain name influence search engine rankings?
What are search engine friendly URLs, and how might you go about constructing them?
List 4 website optimization techniques that can speed up the indexing of a website.
Describe how the Google canonical problem can adversely affect a website's search ranking, and outline the solution to the problem.
Describe how dynamic URLs can be made search engine friendly.
Identify why younger domains tend to have lower search rankings.
Describe the best solution for directing users to a page that has been relocated while preserving the search ranking of the old page.
Why is it important to include a robots.txt file in a website? Where is it placed?
What role does a sitemap.xml file play in improving the findability of a website?
List important elements to be included on custom 404 error pages to get lost users back on track.

Describe how high quality content that serves a target audience's needs can affect the findability of a website.
List and describe best practices in content creation that foster findability.
Describe how Creative Commons open licensing of content can potentially improve findability.
How might user-generated content influence findability?
How might the design of a home page influence content findability?
List 4 types of content that might could be added to an ecommerce site to improve findability.
Describe how aggregating content from social media sites can vastly improve findability.
Explain how you would research keywords to feature in your website for best SEO results, and how you could evaluate keyword density/prominence.
Describe the role of social networking websites in improving findability.

Identify how audio and video files should be presented on a website to ensure search engines can index the content.
Describe progressive enhancement and its role in SEO.
List and describe methods of presenting Flash content to improve SEO.
Describe the indexing problems posed by Ajax, and identify methods that could make Ajax more search engine friendly.

List and describe tools and techniques that could be employed to add a search system to a website.
Describe OpenSearch and how it might be integrated into a website to improve findability.
Describe how logging search terms can inform a findability and content creation strategy.

List and describe important web analytics metrics that are markers of findability success or failure.
Describe how heat maps and session recordings can inform the design of a web page.
Describe how web analytics software typically gathers information.
What is "bounce rate", and why is it a vital statistic to watch?