Help! I don't appear in Google ... at all!

This on has been bugging me for such a long time as I have put a lot of work into my website. I acquired my domain about a year ago and initially set it up as my photography site and did nothing with it. Then about three months re-hauled it into my Face Painting site as it is today, promoted it and I am getting about 5 to 10 hits a day from facebook, the odd redirected search result and direct traffic.

The Problem is I do not feature in Google search results. There are links and ads pointing to me, but the actual site never features. I have heard that if you type "sites:" and then your web address it should come up with your website if your are on Google, with mine I get no results at all. I had Adwords for a little bit and have registered the business on Google places ... it also doesn't show up even though I have confirmed it via post.

I have submitted it to Google for reconsideration, I guessed because of the shift in subject and the long term dormancy of the site it may have dropped off the crawl. I abide by google's rules, regularly update content, worked on my keywords and have posted links elsewhere to my site.

Can anyone help me at all? my website is www.jemmascott.co.uk

Thanks in advance

You said you Acquired it.... Did you buy the domain from someone who previously had it? And if so, do you know for how long and what the subject matter was?

You do have to submit your site to google, so if you have not done that, do so.

Seems off to me that it is HOSTED on google, but doesn;t show.

Sorry that's my wording, I am the first person to own it, I aquired it through a government program called 'getting British businesses online'.It's a googlesite, which I went with because I thought it would be easy to get it onto Google that way! I have submitted it and also resubmitted it. I just don't understand!

How long have you had it?

I found this reference on a forum: had the same problem and was advised to check with Gbbo to make sure that my account had been set up correctly, it turns out that it hadn't been populated
double check with http://who.is/whois/*your site address* to make sure that it has been registered

Bingo.... I looked it up and no mapping exists! Contact your registrar.

Oh wow, thankyou. I would never have known how to look for that. I'll give the GBBO people a call

What IS Gbbo, btw? Oh, duh- I just re-read... never mind. I know now. See- I are smart about SOME things!

Hi
Some other comments to help resolve this for you:

When you say you don't show on Google .... for what search terms?

Also - when you submit your 'site' to the search engines (do it for ALL the major ones) ... which pages have you submitted? Do it for EVERY page, not just the domian root (home page).

Although you say you have worked on youtr keywords, I notice that your site isn't doing so many of the onsite-optimisation stuff that'll get you listed higher. It's almost devoid of internal links, good photo file names and tags etc.

How are you going about creating incoming links?

There's a lot yet to be done ... so you'll soon be found online!

John

I can't help you with your question, but while I looked up your name I found a link to your you tube video for LisaJoyYoungs contest. I also see the face in your avatar.

You rock! It looks great. Good Luck in the contest.
Good Luck with your site too.

Google tell you on their help pages that if you search "site:www.example.com" (where example.com is your site) the search will return all the pages of your site that Google lists on it's searches. When you do this for my site it says no results, so I know my site wasn't being indexed at all despite me submitting every page to google. I found the route of the problem, with help from here - My webmaster tools were not set up correctly and i had no site mapping. I've rectified this and I added a new page to my site last night after sorting it and now when you type in "Site:www.jemmascott.co.uk" you get the page I added last night returning. The rest will (fingers crossed) start to show after the next crawl.

So initially my problem wasn't with search optimisation but now that is my focus as I (hopefully) have resolved the initial issue and want to get up on the listings!

John, I didn't realise internal links were so important, I don't think I have any! I'll start to make sure plenty are in place. My site is a googlesite and apparently you can not rename photo's once uploaded, I didn't know about photo naming when I started out, so in time I plan to re-upload them all. I have been naming the ones I have done this for things like 'fairy body art.jpg' are these the types of names I should be using?

Tags, I have no idea about so will have to get researching and reading on that one!

External links wise I have my face book page for the business, I have links in my signature in several forums I post on regularly, I have a local bouncy castle company I work with and our sites are linked, hoping to do the same with a cake and party bag provider, I make GumTree adverts and listings, do the same for Net mums, I use several free directories, I have a google places page and did use adwords for a month or so over halloween but was a little pointless whilst my site wasn't being indexed. I have my details listed on the website of the monthly events I work from too.

Thank you both for all your help, I am learning so much. Laurie, Thanks for the compliment, It was one of those faces that kinda evolved as it went, started off with a skull idea, not sure what you'd call it at the end! Plus I am still a bit rubbish at painting myself but have a lack of willing models!

Thanks so much again, I really appreciate it all!
Jemma

not sure if the jpg file name is the thing search engines look for... I have "alternate text" attached to each picture in case for some reason the person's computer can't display the photo itself and I think that might get indexed as a photo title?

Ah Perry, thansk for that, I am going to look into that too ... more SEO research for me! I am genuinely getting into it

I didn't even realize you had to submit your website to google!! Thankyou soo much. I am sooooo new at this website thing and SEO, but I am going to study study study!