Why not index the index?

You know, I can't figure out this Search Engine stuff. I guess what I mean is THE search engine Google . I'm still trying to "optimize" my site so that I have a decent rank when searched for things like "COMPOSER" or "SONGWRITER" or "MUSIC", but it's really a bitch. I've submitted a sitemap but I'm frustrated. When I check my server logs, I see that Google is crawling my site at least once a day, which is GREAT. But, the GoogleBot is acting insane. For some reason, it's crawling everything except my Index Page . That's right, for some unknown reason, the GoogleBot just hates the URL http://www.mikeiscool.net/index.html . It'll crawl every Shockwave object, every JPEG , hell, even old archives of the Mikeiscool Blog . The good news is, GoogleBot seems to like my RSS feed and my blog homepage. Soooooo, I'm going to place a few links to the Mikeiscool Homepage and hope that the GoogleBot will follow the damned links!!!! 

I wouldn't ordinarily care so much, but the GoogleBot hasn't crawled my homepage since 10/17/2006, despite being on my server everyday. I've made some pretty significant changes to my entire site (particularly my homepage ) to try to get a better ranking with various keywords that are relevant. The bitch of it is, if GoogleBot won't crawl me (ok, won't crawl my index page ) then I'm afraid that it's not seeing the "top" file, and thus, won't be able to make the appropriate changes to it's mysterious "algorithm". If this is the case, I'll never know if my changes are affecting my sites ranking. I've used every keyword density tool available to see that I should see HUGE changes, but if GoogleBot doesn't see my my homepage , I fear it'll never see the changes. Here's to hoping this helps.