Well I’ve finally done what I have set out to achieve. Eighteen days and 37 posts after setting myself a target of getting in the top 10 results for my name “Philip Nicosia” I have finally made the top spot in Google with this site www.philipnicosia.com.

I’m also number 1 in MSN.com for the same search term but Yahoo! is a different story altogether.

I briefly made an appearance at No. 3 in Yahoo! but have since been relegated to the Number 23 slot. What’s going on there?

The most surprising thing I see in Yahoo! is the number 1 result “Compare prices for Philip Nicosia - DVD-Video. Read dvd-video reviews and compare prices at Yahoo! Shopping.” leading to a virtually blank page with my name on it and a blank section titled “Popular Films by Philip Nicosia”.

Maybe there is a film maker named Philip Nicosia that I’ve never heard of? It’s not me unless of course you include home movies such as this one.

It will be interesting to see if my results improve in Yahoo! soon.

Google looks like it has updated it webmaster sitemaps tool and added a few new features.

I notice you can now set a preference to have your site show up with or without the www in front of your domain. They may save a lot of problems with duplicate content where webmasters haven’t setup redirects and have identical pages for both www and without.

I also noticed a crawl rate link which is maybe something for the future as it goes to a 404 page not found.

On the main diagnostics page for your site it also alerts you to any problem areas you may have whereas before you had to dig a little deeper before you found those.

All in all some nice little changes and worth a look.

It’s always satisfying to get search engine hits for any site but especially for a new one. Over the last couple of days I’ve noticed that Google has been sending me visitors for a variety of search terms relating to unlocking the Sony Ericsson Edge card in my Sony VGA UX180P.

I’m actually quite surprised about this as looking at the results although I am in the top 10 there are better and more informative sites there.

Still, its nice to be indexed and even nicer to get hits even if I’m not making any money from this site.

If you want your website to rank within the search engines one of the most important things to do is get links to your site. Without these then search engines will either not find you or think your site isn’t important enough to rank for anything worthwhile.

Once your site gets better known if its good enough it will attract links from other sites without you even asking but when your starting out it doesn’t matter how good it is if no-one can find it in the first place.

A good way to start gaining these all important links is to submit your site to as many relevant directories as possible. This needn’t cost you anything other than your time as there are literally 100’s of free web directories available and one site which lists quite a few is DirectoryList.org. There you will find plenty of directories to get you started.

If you don’t have enough time on your hands to do it then again there are plenty of places where you can find people you can pay to do it for you. One such site is RCPlinks.com which offers an affordable directory submission service.

I did a search on Google today for funny ringtones. Out of the top 10 results 1 was a page not found and the cached version was a page of keyword spam, 5 redirected to what looked like pay per click pages, and 1 had no content. which leaves just 3 results for genuine pages. The next 10 results there were 7 redirects to what looked like pay per click pages.

That means for this search term out of the Top 20 results 70% is spam.

Now I’m not knocking Google as I think generally they do a pretty good job. I just wish they could detect redirects better so we can have better search results.