This tutorial was done on the 6th of November at J. Boye 2012 conference in Aarhus Denmark. Tutorial was done by Kristian Norling.
Findability and Your Content
As the amount of content continues to increase, new approaches are required to provide good user experiences. Findability has been introduced as a new term among content strategists and information architects and is most easily explained as:
“A state where all information is findable and an approach to reaching that state.”
Search technology is readily used to make information findable, but as many have realized technology alone is unfortunately not enough. To achieve findability additional activities across several important dimensions such as business, user, information and organisation are needed.
Search engine optimisation is one aspect of findability and many of the principles from SEO works in a intranet or website search context. This is sometimes called Enterprise Search Engine Optimisation (ESEO). Getting findability to work well for your website or intranet is a difficult task, that needs continuos work. It requires stamina, persistence, endurance, patience and of course time and money (resources).
Tutorial Topics
In this tutorial you will take a deep dive into the many aspects of findability, with some good practices on how to improve findability:
- Enterprise Search Engines vs Web Search
- Governance
- Organisation
- User involvement
- Optimise content for findability
- Metadata
- Search Analytics
Brief Outline
We will start some very brief theory and then use real examples and also talk about what organisations that are most satisfied with their findability do.
Experience level
Participants should have some intranet/website experience. A basic understanding of HTML, with some previous work with content management will make your tutorial experience even better. A bonus if you have done some Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for public websites.