I recently helped re-launch a website and soon we noticed that we are ranked first in Google when you search for the name of the organization, which is equal to the domain name and also found in the title text of each page of our website ("CZF"). However when you search for other terms that are related to this organization (e.g. search for: christliche gemeinde in frankfurt), then the site is not even among the first 100 hits. What to do ?
"In the past , search engine optimization was synonymous with adding meta tags. These tags provide a web page’s description and associated keywords ... Current ranking methods take many more factors into consideration, with meta tags being only a very small part of the equation. Many search engines (Google, AltaVista, Lycos, etc.) rank web pages according to their link popularity, which is determined by the number and quality of other sites linking to a certain site." (quoted from http://www.webdesignsbyjeffrey.com/faq-4-Improve+your+Link+Popularity.html)
Another hint given by the same author is adding your site to the dmoz.org directory (the czf.de website acutally is not yet in this directory at the time of writing this). The dmoz.org directory powers many other directories and search engines (AOL Search, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Netscape Search).
http://www.seorank.com/ has more information on search engine ranking, however they make money from search engine optimization and I have some doubts that everything is true what they are saying.
Comment added 29 Oct 04: More than one month went by and I still have not heard from DMOZ, i.e. they still have not included my website :-(
Comment added 01 Feb 05: Finally the website can now be found in DMOZ :-)
