What Can We Learn from Google Blogs?

In the past couple of days I've been reading a lot about SEO and other design considerations that can drive traffic and increase AdSense earnings.

Along the way I've made some changes to my site structure, mostly notably by moving around certain advertisments. This morning as I was checking out the Inside AdSense blog provided by Google something struck me - here's a blog, written by the folks who control SEO.

What do they do that I can learn from?

Here are a couple of quick things I noticed about the Google Blog that should prove interesting to anyone interested in Site Design.

1. Their permalink structure is based on year/month/title. This pretty much confirms a lot of SEO tipsters who recommend using 'friendly permalinks.' In WordPress you can accomplish this by visiting the 'permalinks' section of your Options menu.
2. Site titles are broken up in a couple of different ways. The index page displays only the site title, "Inside AdSense." Single pages and "label" pages contain the site title followed by the post title. One example is "Inside AdSense: Must-read policy Thursdays." I've seen a lot of SEO folks recommend either moving your site title to the end of your post title, or removing it completely. In this case Inside AdSense is kind of opting against that idea.
3. This one is a bit of a surprise to me - there's no Meta Keywords tag setup. This could be related to some sort of shortcoming in the Blogger software or it could be a conscious decision by Google. Usually SEO folks will recommend putting your posts tags, categories, keywords or even a post excerpt in a meta tag... Inside AdSense is kind of rocking the boat again.
4. Another interesting part about the code involves how the site is setup. Many bloggers make the mistake of putting their Sidebar code before they're main content in when building a page. If you view a page, with CSS turned off, and you see the sidebar first it's generally considered a bad thing.
5. Another thing I found interesting was the way they're sidebar was setup. First is a search bar, then the feed buttons and then archives, labels (basically categories), email subscription signup and finally a blogroll. Clearly useability is what's kept in mind - they want you to be able to find everything quickly and also to be able to sign up with ease.

Definitely some interesting stuff. I'm starting to work on a new template and these are all things I'm going to keep in mind as I start blogging things out. Anyone else notice anything interesting about the design?