Evan Sims, a recent convert from Flickr to SmugMug, has whipped up a little something to help make getting to those SmugMug unfriendly URLs a little bit easier - SmugUrl:

one aspect I didn't like was their URL scheme. They have good reasons for doing it, and I can't fault them for trying to maintain the privacy and security of their users. Heck, I applaud them for it. Still, I like my URLs pretty, and more importantly search engine friendly. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and build SmugURL.

His example replaces this - http://evansims.smugmug.com/gallery/4717671_Ywtjp#279209234_a2ALu - with this - http://smugurl.com/evansims/myst_online...much more readable. He's even created a little bookmarklet you can drop into your bookmarks to make creating the URLs quick and easy. Check out for more.

In a (very) brief post on Simplesem.com today, there's some suggestions to help you and your site be properly noticed by Google and other search engine spiders out there.

The steps are basic, but they are a good place to start if you're looking at getting started with "search engine optimization". The main suggestion is to use an Apache rewrite rule to change url parameters into part of the path (and vice-versa). Obviously, it's not the solution for everyone as you'd need access to the server's config to use it.