SEO

Of all the things that Google mentioned in the .pdf it was the simple practices that interested me the most. I often finding directory structures and file names to be a hodgepodge of odd folders and files. Google suggests structuring your page with easily understandable directories. This helps me if I find myself at a page like doxtad.com/sandwiches/ham.html. Oftentimes I'll get to a page like this and I'll realize that I want to reach a directory of all sandwiches, so I'll delete the ham part. But it doesn't take me anywhere. It's even worse if the file is more like /sudo/snd/wch/new.html. Who does this? Everyone. Certainly no one can be surprised when Google's bots get lost in this mess.

Another interesting thing I found in this was the nofollow relationship value. I guess I'd never understood what that means, but now that Prof. Masiclat has explained how Google indexes and ranks pages it makes sense that people wouldn't necessarily want to be associated with all of their outbound links. Other simple things like appropriate page titles and alt text for images is something I think most people take as a given, but when they aren't there it makes for trouble, and not just with SEO.

SEO gets a lot of talk these days. And you know what else does? Twitter!

This mashable article on SEO and Twitter is especially interesting. If anyone has been Googling themselves lately they might have noticed their Twitter profile is shooting up the ranks. This could become especially interesting if Google begins indexing Tweets to provide a real-time search results. For companies this could provide a way of leading organic search results by providing light speed information.