Google are piloting the Google Sitemaps project – a way for you to submit a sitemap all the pages of your website in order to improve your coverage in the Google index.

The benefits of submitting a sitemap to the Google search engine are:

• all pages on your website will be found by the Google spider
• you can “push” your content to Google rather than waiting for the spider
• your page content will be fresher in the Google index
• you can provide specific information to the Google spider, such as when the page was last modified or how frequently it changes.

Jakob Nielsen has published his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005. The oldies continue to be goodies — or rather, baddies — in the list of design stupidities that irked users the most in 2005.

It is always worth taking advantage of free trial software to evaluate its suitability for your business. The other advantage, of course, is you get to use some powerful software for free, if only for a short time!

I’m currently trialling Click Tracks Optimizer, the overall winner for 2005 Best Web Site Analytics Tool. It’s expensive at US$1195, and I only get to play with it for 14 days.

But if you give the free trial a go, it could give you valuable insight to assess the current situation and performance of your website.

Connected Nottingham and the East Midlands eBusiness Club are offering a range of free courses for local businesses. Take advantage of half day briefings covering eBay, blogging, PR, and news about search engines. Excellent in-depth courses over 3 days covering Online Marketing, managing web design projects, and online marketing for web designers.

Small businesses anywhere in the Greater Nottingham area are eligible to take advantage of this programme.

Do you need to resize images to put on your website, sell goods on eBay, or include in your weblog? Image Resizer is a Microsoft PowerToy, a simple and free utility that allows you to change pictures to be whatever size you need.

Just download the software. After that, anytime you right-click on an image you will see a new menu choice called “Resize Picture.” Set your dimensions, and a new image is created.

True Blue Peter, here is one I created earlier; you can see the resizer menu open:

A9.com is Amazon’s still-in-beta-release Internet search engine. What’s different about this search engine? It all has to do with personalisation and content. You have a mixable set of columns of information to display, it keep track of your search preferences and histroy. It also includes Amazon’s “Search in a Book” facility and links to a range of other searching resources.

It is worth having a look at what’s new in A9

I had a play with A9’s new Yellow Pages facility which incorporate street view photographs of the businesses you search for, currently available in 10 American cities. We are going to see The Lion King on Broadway, and I had a sneak preview of the theatre.

A9 probably won’t replace your favourite search engine, but it’s worth checking out.

Viral marketing campaigns are designed to catch on by word of mouth rather than by flashy TV, print or radio advertising. It’s advertising specially designed to be so interesting or amusing that we naturally spread the message on, just like a germ virus spreads into an epidemic.

There are some intersting viral advertising campaigns going on at the moment:

Storewars was produced by the Organic Trade Association to dovetail with the Star Wars summer cinema blockbuster.

Burger King’s Subservient Chicken is an Internet legend – and still going strong. Ask the man in the chicken suit to do virtually anything: dance, lay an egg, fly.

Have a look – and notice the Tell a Friend Option – and remember it is all viral. Like this blog.

There are so many cool tools on the Internet, but I’m not completely sure why we need them.

How about Twinengine which lets you search Google and Yahoo simultaneously – Google’s results on the left, Yahoo’s on the right.

How about Firefox’s contextual search in Google – highlight some text on any web page, right click, and select to Search Web for… and automatically Google searches for your selected text.

Just not enough hours in the day!

Data Recovery

That previous post wasn’t very helpful, was it?

It’s pretty annoying to be alerted to a new service such as Google Sitemaps, and then be advised not to use it.

You all know how important site maps are. It’s like exercise: best intentions and all that. Can I suggest a tool that you should use right now which will automatically create a sitemap for you:

Spider Map Links Page Creator will create a free spider map of your site, including both links and descriptions. It generates the code, and you just paste it into a new page on your website.

Quick, easy, no anoraks involved.

My recommended cool tool of the month: a search engine optimisation toolkit that aims to be a “one stop shop” when conducting your web marketing situation analysis.

GoLexa takes a huge number of SEO tools and puts them all together in a single control panel. It displays alot of information we all need to know: Google Page Rank, Alexa Traffic rankings, link popularity checker, keyword analyser, page size checker, spider simulator…

But it also includes some utilities I’ve not played with before, such as the Google AdSense utility. This utility shows which Google Ads would appear on your chosen page based on your content or keywords.

It’s a great SEO research tool!