Search engine optimization (SEO) is important. (Duh!) But, being a developer I never spent much time thinking about these things. However, with my new ventures I am now in a position to actually care about search results.

To that end, on Wednesday I attended a talk/networking event at Yahoo’s Santa Monica office given by Vanessa Fox of  janeandrobot.com. The discussion was informal, yet informative even for one who has just begun to be interested in SEO. I learned several things, many of which are available elsewhere on the web, but I will repeat them here in no particular order:

• The guiding principle of SEO is similar to that of journalism: For each page, imagine that the user has just landed there and not seen any other pages of the site.
• The consensus amongst the group was that the only search engine that matters is Google. Yahoo is nearly irrelevant. Bing/Microsoft does not yet have their act together.
• The most important features of a page are url, <title>, <h1>, and meta description. URLs should be vaguely descriptive (i.e. not something like store?prodid=12)
• Text should be unique (especially the text in the above features).
• Ads are bad.

And, a few resources that I have found in the past few days:

1. Google’s best practice document [pdf]
2. janeandrobot.com/resources (note how the URL exactly describes what it is!)
3. Yahoo’s site explorer
4. Google site search – ie google “site:yourdomain.com”. Are you happy with the way things look in the result? If not, edit the meta description.
5. Of course, Google’s free webmaster and analytics tools. (signup required)

I am very pleased to announce the launch of Smartovation Technologies, a new venture devoted to iPhone and web applications. We expect to be able to submit at least one new App this month. Stay tuned for updates!

And, work continues on the walki-talk.com audio tour guides.

This, in a nutshell, is why Linux will never take over.

[xkcd.com]

Last night I learned that walki-talki.com’s walking tour of London was just approved by Apple for release and posted to the App Store. I won’t re-post all of the details (you can check them out here). But I will say that it’s about time!! Apple has taken nearly 2 weeks to approve this app, but has not yet approved our Amsterdam tour, despite it being submitted a month earlier! Anyway, enough griping. We are very pleased to be making progress.

The party last night was great! Cake (the band, not the food) played for us for a little more than an hour. I took some pictures, but iPhoto is crashing when I try to download them. (Hey Apple, what’s up with that?) It was a true geek party in that the ratio of men to women was about 100:1. One woman actually took a picture of the huge line for the men’s room. (Needless to say, there were no lines for the women’s.)

This morning I focused on fixing bugs in our app, both serious and trivial. I got some great advice on how to properly design the internals of the application to take full advantage of Apple’s architectecture. The Apple engineers have been an enormously valueable source of information from quick tips & tricks to detailed answers.

Today’s lunchtime speaker was Neil Young (no, not the singer), CEO of Ngmoco. This company was founded in March 2008, as a direct result of the release of the iPhoneOS 2.0, SDK & App Store. It was interesting to hear how quickly they were able to put the whole thing together and begin earning revenue.