Inspired by this post on weblog tweaks to help spiders, I've made entry titles be part of the permalinks. Since I was modifying my MT template, I also took this opportunity to implement a CSS trick that I had seen some place: the permalink pound sign now appears only when hovering over the link. While I was at it, I also fixed the issues that IE6 was having with the header graphic (it doesn't handle negative margins, so instead of doing my padding in the body element, I had to shift it to the content one.).

There is an ironic aspect to all of this: in trying to help spiders and indexers I'm actually hindering them in the short term. By changing my permalink style, I've had to to regenerate all archive pages. Any spiders that now revisit the site will have to re-crawl everything, thinking that things had changed, when in fact the content is the same (there is a workaround, but implementing it is another story).