http://www.saigonnezumi.com/?p=982

But ?p=982 is not very search engine friendly. Google ranks text in the url higher than text in the body. I like the way Plone turns the title of a piece of content into the url. For example, my latest blog entry is called:

http://tracyreed.org/blog/archive/2008/06/17/get-less-junkmailprotect-your-credit

So if someone googles for junkmail or credit or something they are more likely to find my relevant blog posting. My main personal website url used to be ultraviolet.org but a year ago I changed it to be tracyreed.org because I wanted to be higher in the google search ranking when someone searches for “Tracy Reed”. I used to be number 1 on google until IMDB and lots of other places started putting movie information online at which point the actress by the same name was on top and I was on page 3 or 4. But then I changed my domain name to put Tracy Reed as part of the url and now I am number 7 on the first page. So url’s that actually contain relevant keywords and not a bunch of random letters, numbers, and symbols are a very simple and effective way of implementing some SEO.

BTW, title tags are not required for XHTML validation, and proper tagging is somewhat of a science.

I agree that you should do the whole standards compliance dance, yes, but this doesn’t mean you can forget about some proper SEO and all will be fine for everyone. Both are important, and to be a top-of-your-game web developer, you need to know both.

My 2¢.