I am an artist (painter and sculptor)and I have made my own web site
http://davidsaunders.biz/ I have been trying to get it listed on
Google for the past 7 months, but it never appears.  Is there
something about the way I have composed the site that makes googlebot
reject it?  Please visit the site and see how nice it is, and let me
know what I can do that will allow searchers of "David Saunders"
"artist, sculptor, painter" to find my site on Google.  I don't know
what to do.  Since my URL is my full name, I would have hoped that my
site would show up on Google, but is there something wrong with the
"biz" prefix?

Hi there,


Facts
-----

1. Presumably you have submitted to Google manually using:
://www.google.com/addurl.html

2. There is a link to your site that Google is aware of:
http://www.normansaunders.com/Links.html

3. There is some indexable content within your site

4. Google has no problems with any TLD, and that includes .biz. Google
will index them all, and rank them all equally

5. You do not have any robots.txt of robots META tag telling Google
not to index your site

6. AlltheWeb has indexed your site
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?_sb_lang=any&cs=utf-8&cat=web&q=url.all%3Adavidsaunders.biz+site%3Adavidsaunders.biz&avkw=fogg

I can see no techinical reason for not being indexed by Google.


Problems
--------
Your site is great looking. I found it a little difficult to navigate,
but that's okay, museums are for meandering. Your site is very visual.

However, Google likes text. Google loves text. Without text content
Google cannot function. Your home page and then lobby.html, when you
exclude links, contain a total text content of one word "lobby".
Googlebot may well have wrongly guessed that your entire site will be
similar and there is no point indexing it. Or it may have looked
deeper and decided the ratio of words to pages (ignoring text within
links) does not warrant indexing. Google has never published any
mention of not indexing sites like yours, this is pure speculation.
But they do say:

Reasons your site may not be included:
You employ doorway pages. Google does not encourage the use of doorway
pages. We want to point users to content pages, not to doorways or
splash screens
://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html

Design and Content Guidelines:
Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly
and accurately describe your content.
://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html


Solutions
---------
Get some text in the home page. Because it is a "splash" page, Google
may have decided to ignore your site. Add text throughout - short
paragraphs wherever possible. Google would love this page (although I
cannot find how to get to it via the homepage):
http://www.davidsaunders.biz/scu-stmnt.html

From purely a search engine point of view, I would combine the
information on the following page with some explanatory paragraphs,
and make it your home page:
http://www.davidsaunders.biz/DS-BIO.html

Submit your site to the appropriate directory within Open Directory:
http://dmoz.org

I would go for the following category, however it is worth browsing to
see if a more appropriate category exists. The higher up the
hierarchy, the better your site will rank on Google:
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Visual_Arts/Sculpture/Sculptors/

Open Directory editors don't want to work too hard to decide on a
submission. So when they visit your homepage, make it easy for them to
determine the content contained within it.

Wait
----
When you are listed at Open Directory, and if you put some text into
your homepage, I would expect your site to be indexed. I don't KNOW
this for sure, such is the nature of search engine optimization - but
there will be no reasons left for Google to not index your site.

Best wishes,
robertskelton-ga

Wow!  What a thoughtful and informed response.  I really appreciate
the professional interpretation of why my site has been so ignored by
googlebot.  All of the suggestions seem like ideas for ways to proceed
that I have never heard of, so I have high hopes that I may make some
progress after instituting these recommendations.  I am so relieved to
have the personal evaluation of my actual site, instead of a
boiler-plate answer to my F.A.Q. I have wasted seven months in
unproductive frustration over this inability to submit to Google in an
effective manner.  Thank you.

I have a quick comment.

Your Title tag is one of the most important elements on how Google
will find you.  You need to think about what people will be searching
for.

If you think people are searching for "David Saunders," "David
Saunders Art," "David Saunders Paintings and Scupltures," etc. then
that is what should go into your title tag (without the quotes).

Right now, your title shows:

<TITLE>davidsaunders.html</TITLE>

Can almost guarantee, nobody will be searching for that.

You'll also need to write some text on home page.  Google is trying to
figure out what your site is about so it can direct relevant visitors
to your site, but the problem is that its blind and can't see your
graphic.

You're very talented as an artist, by the way.  Great work.

Hope that helps.

Beautiful work! I especially like the Conductor's Watch and Keychain.

The "Broken Branches" series is remarkable.

I hope your site moves up in the listings. It's well worth touring.