Those of us who make websites learn to be jacks-of-all trades: project managers, designers, developers, content strategists, information architects and usability experts. But after all our work, our creations would be like the proverbial tree in the forest, unseen, unheard, if our job description doesn't include findability guru. If we don't help people find the websites they seek and content within those websites, we haven't done our job.

Reaching your target audience in a cacophonous universe of other websites all vying for the same thing - attention, is our challenge. In order for findability to be effective it needs to be understood.
Focusing on findability - step by step through the phases of the website development cycle:

1. Planning - Assemble a master list of keywords and phrases to help users find the site. Do it early on, during this first phase of the process.
2. Content Development - Copywriters can then integrate these words and terms into new or existing content carefully. Do not stuff the page - the language must be natural for both the human reader and for the search engine's crawler * (It's smart enough to sniff out a ruse!)
3. Design - The design phase is critical to findability. The designer directs the user's gaze, showing her where to look on the page, leading him intuitively through the site.
4. Development - Web standards and findability are closely linked. The mass of redundant code that web standards now eliminate from pages improves the ratio of content to code, boosting a site's ranking in the search engines
5. Usability - Usability experts are naturals at findability. They evaluate to what degree a site is navigable. They can also evaluate how easy it is to find the site via search engines and check page rankings on target keywords.

The usability guru Jakob Neilsens tells us "Write to be found", because if you don't show up on the first page of a SERP (search engine results page), you may as well not exist. He advises us to use old, familiar words because they are the words most likely to be entered in a search.

Guidelines for writing to ensure findability:

• Supplement made-up words with known words - while you can use new terminology for effect, make sure to supplement them with "legacy" words.
• Play down marketese and internal vocabulary - the very fact that a word is unexciting indicates that it's frequently used.
• Supplement brand names with generic terms - use your brand name for 5% of the audience who know you exist, but don't abandon the other 95% who don't know the name of your solution.
• Avoid "politically correct" terminology. For example use "blind" or "low-vision" rather than "visually challenged". These terms are not only more precise, they are the words that will be searched on, the words that spring to mind.

- adapted from Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox