Love the summary – have written something similar for some colleaugues who are looking to blog. I use some of the same WP plugins myself.

The whole series on music here is applicable to the much wider market as well. Thanks for wonderful content.

I’m intrigued – did you original post use the “The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online”? as that is much better than 20 Things as a title or heading for SEo and getting noticed/.

Really? How does Google know that? Are they watching me?!

How one might deal with that as a primarily image-based site would be to keyword images. Tag them as fully as possible. That’s what would contribute to SEO. From what you say, javascript neither assists nor impedes the process.

On the “nofollow” issue, there’s an interesting article at Search Engine Journal on exactly that, where they ask the heads of three of the biggest Search engines how they treat the tag. Google seems to be the only one that follows the manufacturer’s instructions.

Regarding Java and JavaScript, did you realise they are two different things? Java is a programming language (you may remember that the Azereus Bittorrent software is written in Java) and JavaScript is a scripting language that you will most commonly come across as a client side script running in your web browser. Both are trademarks of Sun Microsystems but are mostly unrelated.

jamesdebenham.com uses JavaScript to overlay the images you see when you click the thumbnails in the various galleries. The page is all valid XHTML and CSS, the JavaScript provides the transparent overlay and the resizing animations. In a browser with the JavaScript disabled the images would just open in a new window.

I understand the point regarding Flash as if all your content exists in an embedded Flash movie and the user doesn’t have the correct plug-in they will see nothing. However I don’t see using JavaScript in a compliant way as a problem with SEO. I think standards compliancy and SEO go hand in hand.

This is particularly true in the case where people reading the blog you’ve commented on (say, this one) will read your comment and then go and visit your site (say, by clicking on the words Pete Ashton above) — and then end up reading and linking to your site themselves.

It will certainly do you no harm — as long as your memberships and comments are genuine, and you’re not trying to play the system (which is what the tag is set up to catch).

The rel=nofollow tag is, as the Wikipedia entry you’ve linked to suggests, a little bit controversial. It’s not always embedded into comment systems by default, and it’s not always discounted by all search engines.

Um, probably not. All comment systems have rel=nofollow implemented so any links left will not be followed. nofollow is also used on most social networking sites. The only way to get pagerank is to be linked to by the owners of websites.

(Oddly enough MySpace doesn’t use nofollow, which is really odd!)