Help - why does Google hate me?

I have a small personal photography site, www.nightfolio.co.uk/

I have tried to optimize this site within reason, and have a reasonble number of quality sites linking to me. Sadly when I search Google using my keywords "night photography" I am listed after roughly 550 other sites! I am completely baffled why I am listed so badly by Google, and I would be very grateful if anyone has any suggestions what I am doing wrong!

your site has the potential to rank top 20.

1) change your title from "David Baldwin Night Photography" to "Night Photography by David Baldwin" or some thing similar on your home page.

2) use unique title for each page, don't use the same title for all pages.

3) add detailed description (more text) for your pages. you have some nice photos there, but googlebot only understabd text.

I won't be as optimistic as the other guy, but you need much more text. I don't know about image search in google, but as far as regular search goes, I will be surprised if you get a single referer from google.

Had a quick look - doesn't appear that you are doing anything inherently 'wrong' AFAICT. You have 16 backlinks according to Google so that's pretty good. Your code/markup could do with a clean up - that's maybe one area you could improve but that's a relatively minor point. You have lots of content. I notice that some of the better ranking sites actually have the word "photography" in the name of their website which helps a lot. If it's any consolation you are at the top of page 2 on the new MSN search

Remove the images from the menu and make it text with CSS to look similar. Faster loading time and more text that way.

yes use text link as possible and text sitemap

You're probably in "the sandbox", try typing at least 16 terms of nonsense after your keywords that you want to exclude to see your position if you would be out of it

for example: kw1 kw2 -adfqsd -qsdf -qsdf -qsdf -qsdsqd ...
nonsense words need to be at least four digits long

it seems to me that you're number five then

do some searching on google sandbox and you'll see the only solution is time, you have to wait, it realy sucks, my site is in it as well
my differential amplifier page
my constant current source page
are perfect examples of this stupid sandbox thing

i gave up google, it might take months, I'm focussing on MSN

regards

Make valid links with other related pages. That will work.

I have the same problem with Google. Make sure you have submitted to the directories like DMOZ, Yahoo and others. Google places a lot of weight in those. I dont know if it will help you get out of the sandbox more quickly but its worth a try. Those links will count for a lot anyway.

@Jef Patat: I tried that thing, searched for : 'techcode -wesdfar -qrqr -q4qr -qfur -asfasg -gsgsg3 -asarf -aafaf -perl -ertadf'. And my site is showed somewhere in results finaly.

Untill few days ago, I was ranked #1 for techcode, as that's obviosly site's name, and not very competent one. But now ...

Same story for other keywords I was good for. Such as 'web dizajn' (web design in Serbian) and such.