I've been trying to generate some traffic to a website I created for my brother and his friend (http://www.caribbeanislandcondo.com), so I've been trying to make it visible on Google.
I wanted to test the ability to bring it up using a search for keywords. So I first tried just a couple key words, then when that didn't bring up my site I tried a few more. Eventually, I searched for the first sentence or two from my web page, yet it never came up.
For some reason, if I do a site:www.caribbeanislandcondo.com search, all the pages from the site are listed except for the home page. (Keep in mind the homepage has the best keywords in its content, so the other pages won't likely come up for the searches I'm looking for).

Yesterday I submitted a sitemap to webmaster tools, but so far I still can't get the page on google.

Any ideas gals/guys?

Newish site and/or no decent quality backlinks would be the usual cause.

So without backlinks, would it make sense that a "site:www.caribbeanislandcondo.com" search doesn't list my home page? It lists all the rest, just not the one I need.

Thank you for your reply.

Why do you need the "home" page? In the world of SEO and chasing organic traffic every page has to be a "home" page, not just the site root page.

Without some decent backlinks you will be lucky to keep any pages in the index. One specific problem I have noticed with the site (having just looked at the site there is a great deal wrong with it in optimising terms BTW) is that your internal links are to the index page name (index.html). This should always be to the root, so that your internal links reinforce the external "home" page links you get.

I only mention the home page being needed because it is the only page that would have a large number of key words that would come up in a google search. For example, there isn't a lot of text content on the photo gallery page.

This being only the 2nd web page I've made (and the first time I've handcoded a site), I'm still trying to learn a lot. The first page I made was not something that SEO played a large role in, so I basically designed it and just let it go on the web without trying to generate traffic. I'm trying to read up on how to go about building up some decent backlinks, and I appreciate the comment about linking to index.html (I'll change that right away).

If you have any glaring problems with the site, I'm all ears, but I wouldn't expect you to take the time to help me on that matter.

Thanks again

You would be surprised by;

1/ how much useful text can be put on to a gallery page. Between the alt attributes and some well chosen captions for the photos you can soon build a few targeted phrases.

2/ how little text a page need to become a "listed resource" in search engines.

Glaring Problems:
Page titles.
Inarguably the title element IS THE most important part of the page for search engines. Your titles are just hopeless (no offence meant)

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/seo-ta...-good-bad.html
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/seo-ta...rd-tittle.html

Navigation:
"Recreation 1 2" Absolutely no good at all.
the chances of somebody realising that the 2 is a link are somewhere between slim and none.
Use anchor text that describes what the page is about, if it is also a target phrase so much the better, just don't force it to be.

In order for me to be offended, I'd have to assume I know something about all this stuff. So no worries there.

Thanks for the input... I will look into your suggestions.