Why won't my site show up in searches?

It's been several months since I submitted it to the major search engines and created/submitted the Google Sitemaps file. Even when I type in the exact name of the Museum, word-for-word, in quotes, it still doesn't appear. I didn't include Meta Keywords or Description because everything I read said that tactic is now obsolete. Is that incorrect? Any advice?

www.pacificcoastimmigration.org

Thanks so much!

Hey,

well, for starters take a look at your code. You've got a lot of HTML in there, and very little content. Although your site looks good, that's not what google sees. You need to build content on the homepage.

secondly, although it has been suggested that meta tags are becoming obsolete, for the little effort it takes to put them in, you might as well. There are many, many other engines/directories that make use of them.

thirdly, build quality, relative backlinks. don't get caught up in link farming campaigns either...take the time (believe me, this takes a LOT of time) to do this by hand.

another important thing to keep in mind, is that you're optimizing your site for your visitors, not google. make it the best you possibly can for the people visiting, and google'll pick up on it.

that's a start anyways...best of luck.

For one thing, you are not specifying a character encoding. Add this to your pages:
<meta http-equiv='content-type' content='text/html; charset=utf-8' />

Get your pages validating and they will do better in the search engines.