I have been looking at URLs a lot recently and trying to work out how much they really matter. The quality of URLs is one of many parts to the whole SEO debate that is difficult to negotiate because of so many different views on topic, all with different levels of authority. I have no authority at all really so am keen to investigate using sources that do.

Google’s own SEO starter guide (Pages 8-9 are most relevant to URLs), has some useful insight but doesn’t answer all the questions.

For example, it list 3 best practices for URLs…

• Use Words in URLs – sounds sensible, since words are easier to read than numbers. But how relevant do those words need to be?
• Create a Simple Directory Structure – This deserves a little more discussion, see below…
• Provide one version of a URL to reach a document – This also makes sense given the various rules around duplicate content

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So having assumed my little baking stunt was a one-off foray into the world of SEM and blog popularity I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find my cake atop Google’s official analytics blog. So I thought it was time to go a bit meta and investigate the whole thing. Google didn’t exactly give a full in-depth account of my activities, which turned out to be ideal really. People were coerced into investigating my sugary creation to the full without realising it. People truly are wowed more by icing and baking than any ridiculous cardboard construction or wrap.
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I have only been tapping out rambling nonsense on Twitter for a matter of weeks and only with any real regularity over the past few days, but already I seem to be appearing fairly prominently in Google. Clever me.
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A good usable interface is the holy Grail of all good web applications. Sites like Google and Flickr amongst others have excellently designed sites with good use of the latest JS and AJAX technologies. For mere mortals the only option to achieve similar levels of usability is to use the various JS frameworks and toolkits such as Scriptaculous, MooTools or Dojo.

Going one step further it would be useful to make use of tried and tested components built using these frameworks for integration into the site. Examples of these include calendars, drop-down navigation and forms. This way the only task is to integrate the components with the back-end system and customize to meet all the requirements.

Today I was looking for a scheduling component. Basically a calendar but with the ability to have multiple instances for each module on a page and the ability to drag items onto the calendar and resize for various time periods. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that anything even close exists. There are plenty of calendars but not any that would meet these requirements.

I am going to do some more investigation and see if something can be built. There seems to be a number of Flex resources that might be suitable and I will try and get them working. Integrating a Flex application could be much more tricky. It is going to be a long 3 weeks ahead of me.

UPDATE
I investigated all methods and given the simplicity of the requirements it would just take too long to integrate any of the components available. The Flex example (pictured) certainly holds the most hope for this sort of things. Lets hope some developers push forward the development and add in some additional features. Then it might be worth integrating it into some real systems.