As first point of contact for my site XML-Sitemaps.com I quite often get emails from people saying “Your generator won’t find all my pages”. Because our generator works in the same manner as a search engine robot this is something that all webmasters should be concerned about.

We will always check out these concerns but haven’t as yet found any site that misses a page when there is a link to it somewhere.

The most common reason for this problem is JavaScript menus. They might look nice and fancy on the page but robots are generally blind to the links to your other pages. If they can’t find them then it goes without saying that you’re going to have a tough job getting them indexed.

Another cause is misuse of the robots.txt file. It is surprising how many people block access to search engines without realising it. Google has within their webmaster console in the Google Sitemaps program a robots checker. It allows you to put any of your pages in and it will tell you if it is being blocked.

The Google sitemaps webmaster console will also notify you of other problem areas with your site including pages not found, urls timed out, urls restricted by robots.txt, etc.

They also give you stats showing you the top search queries that are made where your site appears and also which of these bring you the most traffic.

If you have a website and you haven’t already signed up for a Google Sitemaps account then it’s definitely worthwhile and if you need a Google Sitemap then don’t forget you can get one at XML-Sitemaps.com.

Last week I set myself a target to get in the top 10 results in Google for the search term “Philip Nicosia” without the quotes. I was a bit preoccupied yesterday to check but I had a look this morning and to my surprise I came in at No.2!

Hats off to Google for that one. Now you might think it pretty obvious to come in so high for a search term which is basically my name and the name is in the domain and I would agree.

However, despite my site being crawled and listed in both Yahoo! and MSN the same search term doesn’t find me in the top 100 results. I didn’t bother looking any further than that so it might be somewhere. I guess there is more work be done there.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes Yahoo! and MSN to catch up.

I bought a second hand car a couple of days ago and noticed that it had a Parrot bluetooth hands free kit installed. Great I thought and I tried to pair my mobile phone with it only to get a message “Memory Full”. Now I didn’t have the instructions for the kit with the paperwork I got with the car so I did a quick search on Google for “Parrot user guides” and low and behold the number 1 result was for the user guides at www.parrot.biz.

Clearing the memory was as easy as pressing the red and the green button together. Now I was able to pair my phone to the kit and can happily use my phone hands free now and not break the law.

Where would we be without search engines?

In a previous post I mentioned that one of my sites, XML-Sitemaps according to Alexa was the 6707th most popular website in the world. Now I know this isn’t true as I know exactly how many visitors this site gets a day. I also have other websites which receive 5 x the amount of daily visitors yet rank between 50,000 and 60,000.

So why is my site with less visitors showing such popularity? My guess would be that the majority of people who have the Alexa Toolbar installed which collects the data are webmasters who are interested in seeing what their Alexa rank is. As my site XML-Sitemaps is geared towards webmasters this really makes a nonsense of the figures quoted as it isn’t representative of your average surfer.

Apart from the Alexa Rank figures the toolbar provides a convenient search box so you can search the internet without having to go to Google, etc, first. Now this used to be okay when Alexa was using search results powered by Google but recently they changed and now there search results are powered by Windows Live. If there was ever a reason to delete the Alexa Toolbar this would be it.

I’m sorry but Windows Live as a search engine just isn’t cutting it for me. I’m sure they are trying hard but for me its a waste of time. I’ll give you an example:

Searching for “free ringtones” (without the quotes) 5 of the top 10 results (including the top 2) are disabled blogger accounts presumably as they were spam pages designed to fool search engines, another 1 is a disabled homestead page, presumably disabled for the same reason as the blogger pages, the 3rd result is another disabled domain which says “Domain deleted - reason abuse”, another 2 are made for adverts pages which only have adverts on which you can click which just leaves 1 genuine website left.

At least with Google generally I find at least 9 of the top 10 results are genuine sites and the ones that do slip through are normally removed quite quickly.

It makes you wonder how many people will now delete their Alexa Toolbar because of this. It might be the only people left using it are the webmasters to check on their Alexa rank which is only going to make their figures even more unrepresentative of the general surfers.

Okay, I have been very lazy with this site. Partly the reason for this is I wanted to get the site design right before anyone saw it. I’m not expecting to get many visitors if any at all other than from friends and family but I believe presentation is important. I’m a bit of a perfectionist at times and if you are going to do something then you must try to do it well.

Designing and building websites isn’t difficult. Doing it well takes real skill. Its easy to buy a ready made template on the web but I personally don’t like that idea. I would always worry about coming across another site that was using the same template much as a girl would be horrified to go to a party and see someone else wearing the same dress!

If you don’t have the necessary skills to do it yourself then it is worth paying someone to do it for you. There are plenty of web designers around and you even see them advertising on Ebay. Choosing one though can be tough. I’ve looked through many sites and their portfolios and am horrified to see broken pages, bad design and just general lack of attention to detail and that is on the web designers own sites. A tip to any web designer: Make sure your own site works and looks good before trying to sell your services.

The other thing that amazes me is the vast difference in rates that people charge. I have seen people charge as little as £10 for a single page up to £2000 for a 5 page website. Choosing the £10 page will likely be a waste of money and you will get what you pay for. Paying the £2000 for a 5 page website may seem a good idea for a naive company with a budget (who these deals are targeted at) but you are being ripped off.

I was lucky to stumble across Mike Anholm from Anholm.com. Mike has designed a few websites for me including this one. He did the original concept and then integrated into a customized Wordpress theme. Mike offers very affordable web design and produces very good results too. He is very conscientious and will work with you to get the results you want without breaking the bank. If you are looking for a good web designer then give him a go. You won’t be disappointed.

Anyway, back to setting myself a target. Now I have the site design completed I am going to make an effort to get the site ranked for my own name “Philip Nicosia”. Getting to number 1 should be achievable but because I have written quite a few articles that have been published on the internet there are some strong sites which are ranking for this. So my target for this week is to get into the Top 10 results in Google for “Philip Nicosia” within 7 days. I will check next Sunday, 30th July to see if I have achieved it.