I used a seriff package to make my website so don't really understand
all the technical stuff, the website was a set design that i just
added my words and my pictures too. Now for my question, my webiste
www.stephenatherton.com was listed on google, it was not highly ranked
if i typed in "sound recordist" "cumbria" it was there somewhere but
if i typed in "stephen atherton" "sound recordist" it was found as the
only one so at least i knew it was on google, however i made some
alterations to the homepage and now if i type in "stephen atherton"
"sound recordist" i am no longer found. The alterations i made were
made after i checked my webiste on a free site called
www.submitexpress.com and i found out about titles, meta-tags and
keywords for search engines of which it told me i had no title, meta
tags or keywords so i went back to the seriff package and added a
title name some meta tags and keywords all of which were relevant and
short. The other alteration was to change my homepage title from
homepage to sound recordist homepage and i finally added about seven
lines of text to the bottom of the page, that seven lines of text
included a list of places i often work, this was to allow my webpage
to be found by anyone looking for a sound recordist in those towns or
cities, i listed about twelve places, could this be the problem. I
changed my website about five days before it was lost, when i searched
for it for the five days after it was altered it brought back a
'cached result' of my old site and that gave me a link to my site
www.stephenatherton.com. My new site is on msn.com search engine and
the old cached version still on yahoo.com but on google it is lost. I
have read lots of answers for other peoples questions with the same
problems on googles answers pages and i understand that linking my
site to other sites would help but that is not really an option for
me, i am more interested in knowing if something i have done with my
homepage could be the main cause of my site being lost. My site was
never going to be a number one ranked site when searching for a sound
recordist in the U.K but i would have liked it to be findable for
people looking for a sound recordist in the North of England. Could
someone please advise what i have done wrong or does my site seem fine
and maybe the googlebots missed me for some technical reason. Is that
paragraph at the bottom of my homepage a problem, i have no hidden
text on the page or at least i don't think i do. I have read most of
the answers to other peoples questions with similar problems and all i
want to know is what is the likely problem. Thank you for your
patience with regard my rambling question.

Put the keywords Stephen Atherton at the beginning of the Sentence. 
Google love location information.  In the description meta tag use the
keywords Stepen Atherton and then your address, the address helps.

Even after doing this, you may not see a change in google for some
time.  Over the past few months google has been updating it's index
less and less.  Who knows when they'll get back around to your site.

You can check your server logs to see when was the last time google
crawled your site.

Earl Holland
Consultant, HT Internet Services

Stephen --

It's impossible for researchers to know why a site disappeared or
decreased in rank.

However, one of your prime problems is that the source for your "home"
page has no text on it.  It's all Cascading Style Sheets -- which
gives the Googlebot no textual information to read.  You may be forced
to learn a little more about HTML and abandon the automatic Serif
page-creation software if you want a web page that's well-understood
by search engines.

Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA

I have just noticed that some of my web pages, which were formerly
listed quite highly for certain keywords, like #1 on the first page,
are now totally missing.  In some cases I can "force" a match by
adding some totally unique keywords to the search, and then instead of
getting a normal list of search results, I get a page that starts with
a suggestion that people try "Google Answers".  Since my site dealt
with trying to give answers to questions that people might have in
setting up web pages, totally as a reference, nothing interactive and
all for free, I think I can guess why Google would have replaced it
with a link to "Google Answers", but I hesitate to say because I don't
really know, and even saying as much as I have said here may trigger a
'bot that will come along and .... [gasp]

Hi Tron,

Your site can come in 1st page of yahoo or google serach engine. First
try to put as much as text in index and related links and then in
every page add these 2 meta tags
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="7">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW"> 

You will get benifited.

Cheers!!!
Sanjay