Here today gone tomorrow....

I am very new to creating websites, and my first attempt is up and running. For several weeks it did not appear in Google's search results, but I was patient as I know they index every few weeks. Last night, I was thrilled to see us in the top 5 or so for a few searches! Yay! Called my client, he was thrilled and said he would try it out in the morning....and today - nothing. We dont appear anywhere.

What I did do, was when I found we had been indexed, I tried a few searches that I thought people may be using and felt I had left out a few keywords, so I added them. I'm thinking that may have been a mistake?

Page rank is currently zero...am I stuck there forever? Or just another month....

Any feedback would be really appreciated. I have read everything i can get my hands on for Page Rank and Google SEO, but like I said, I'm brand new to this.

Thank you....

search results are served by many datacenters at google. It takes sometime to populate all datacenters. you've done nothing wrong, just wait for a week.

Really? Even though I have a zero page rank? That makes me feel better... I would hate to think I killed his url forever.
Of course I'll have to check it 10 times a day until next week, so I hope it only takes that long, lol.
Thanks for the help...
B.

To get your pagerank up from 0 you just need to get pages that do have pagerank to link to you. It is updated about once every quarter so you'll have to wait a couple more months to see your new PR.

Another thing that I have done that I'm not sure is the right thing to do....each page has its own keywords - ie) the kitchen and bath page has those related words, the renovations page has its own words, the flooring page has its own words....and the name of the company appears a couple of times, in each page's keyword group......is that okay?

This is a great rsource for me to be able to ask questions.thank you so much!

adding different keywords to different pages works well...and Matt_M is right...get linked up with relevent sites with pageranks...to find out who gives/accepts links, simply type your keyword followed by 'add url' in google.

getting listed takes time...you just have to be patient.

Good luck!

What about a robots.txt file...do I need one?

a robots.txt file tells the various spidering bots what you don't want them to look at. typically you would want to have these. have a look on google for more info.

hope that helped!

No you don't need it.

Only if you are going to deny crawling some of your pages or preventing search engines from crasily crawling your site 10000 times a day - rarely happens but generally no harm no good -

Ok...still nothing...what about the fact that my index page is index.htm instead of index.html...could that be a problem? I don't know why it hapened, it is draft #2 of my index page, but I did delete the first draft from the server.

i seriously doubt that's the problem...it's just a matter now of getting backlinks and waiting till googles next update (probably in 2 or 3 months).

So I come home from work today and do a google search....and boom, there I am, Number One (screenshot saved to prove it)...this morning I was nothing...but this is what hapened before, AND it was on a Friday afternoon either 3 or 4 weeks ago....so how did I get there unless google is indexing right now....and dammit I hope i dont get dropped again!!

Cross your fingers for me!!!!

Thank you for all the help.

One more thing....my search results show a line of text that contains a spelling mistake that was fixed LAST TIME google picked me up and put me on the search page...which means it is from an old crawl?? Anyone?