The website for www.silverjimsjewelry.com has been up for several
months.  If I search for Silver Jims Jewelry or if I enter
site:silverjimsjewelry.com (which I understand is a way to find out if
a website is listed with Google), it cannot be found. It seems that this
website should at least come up when a visitor enters Silver Jims
Jewelry. Do you have any advice?

Greetings, jetjoy!

The home page for http://www.silverjimsjewelry.com consists entirely of images. 

This site *has* been visited by the Googlebot:
://www.google.com/search?q=www.silverjimsjewelry.com

However, because everything on this home page consists of *pictures*
of words, rather than actual words, the Googlebot can not read them.
Since it does not think that there is anything on this page, instead
of indexing the rest of the site, it stops crawling and moves on to
another site.

I recently Answered another Question about a site with pretty much the
same problem, and you may find the information that I gave them
helpful as well:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=351097

1) Replace the images of words in the header, footer, and menus with
actual text for those words.
2) Include at least a paragraph of text on your home page describing
the business and products.
2) Use "alt" attributes to label any graphics on the site.
3) Submit the site again to Google at
   ://www.google.com/addurl.html
4) Request that the site be listed in Directories, such as:
   http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Jewelry/Precious_Metals/Silver
   http://www.gocee.com/shopping/jewelers.htm

If these changes are made, I think that you will find that this site
is much more easily searchable via Google.

Regards,

aceresearcher

---

Request for Answer Clarification by jetjoy-ga on 26 May 2004 15:22 PDT

Thank you for your excellent response.  I figured it had to do with
all of those images on the home page.  I can add text to the content
area and add text links to the bottom of the web page, but I really
don't want to give up the images I've used in the header and menu at
the top because those are designed a specific way and need to be
images. Would it be sufficient to add text links at the bottom and add
text content but leave the images in the header and menu?

---

Clarification of Answer by aceresearcher-ga on 26 May 2004 16:08 PDT

Will it help? Probably.

Will it help as much as using text instead? Probably not.

If you do a "View Source" on this home page, you'll see that adding
such text would still put it on the bottom of the HTML source, after a
bunch of javascript and table definitions full of images.

There's just no substitute for *real* content (pure text) at the
beginning of your html file, as far as the Googlebot is concerned. The
farther down the page the text appears, the less importance will be
ascribed to it by the Googlebot.

At the very least, you'll want to pull your JavaScript out into a
separate .js file (if your server supports SSI [server-side includes]
and the HTML tables into an include file
<!-- #include file="silverjims.js" -->
<!-- #include file="header.html" -->
<!-- #include file="menu.html" -->
<!-- #include file="footer.html" -->

Bear in mind that keeping your image-based page means that the
unlinked images of text

Silver Jims Jewelry
Sterling Silver Jewelry
Original Designs
Handcrafted
Copyright 2004 Silver Jims Jewelry. All rights reserved.

will never be indexed by the Googlebot.

Regards,

aceresearcher

I received a timely and excellent answer. Thank you.

Thank you for the excellent rating and the tip! I hope that this
information will be of great assistance to you!

ace