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.

My quest for getting to number 1 in the search engines for my name “Philip Nicosia” isn’t fairing too well. It’s not really surprising though as there are no links to this site and I haven’t manually submitted the site to any search engines.

I did a search today on Google, Yahoo and MSN and on all three search engines there were no results for www.philipnicosia.com.

I’ve been making websites for a few years now so I know what to expect and how hard it can be to get good results but for someone just starting out I also understand how frustrating it can be too. You can spend days, weeks or even years creating the best website in the world, the most informative website in your field but if no one knows it is there where are the visitors going to come from?

One thing you shouldn’t do is take short cuts. As a webmaster you are responsible for your website and trying to cheat the search engines may work short term sometimes but eventually you will get banned. Its not just the search engine algorithms that will catch you out. Competing webmasters who see your site above theirs will want to knock you off. If you are doing everything by the book then you have nothing to worry about but if you are cheating to get there don’t be surprised to see your site suddenly disappear one day. It could only take 1 well written spam report for your website that you’ve invested time and money in to be removed manually from the search engines if your tactics are bad enough.

If you want to keep on the straight and narrow and avoid all the major pitfalls and mistakes then I would recommend getting the SEO Book. Aaron who wrote and constantly updates this book lives and breathes search engines.