However, I still think that Google has tagged your site as suspect for some reason, and thus demoted its ranking. Given that this site was very recently first place for a “friendly atheist” search, and that LiveSearch and Yahoo still put you first, it can’t just be normal backlinks and pageranking. The explanations that people have given above about how to Search Engine Optimize are fine for general sites, but they don’t explain why your site, with the exact same tags and links, would suddently change in ranking. You have a ton of relevant incoming links, and you blog has the two search words right in the title. Any reasonable algorithm will put you in the first few hits, unless the search engine company (Google) has demoted your site for some other reason.

As you’re using Wordpress there are numerous plugins you can use, some are do-it-all like All In One SEO Pack where some are more specialised like Meta Posts. It’s worth trying out. You can also do some things in your theme to help out, like automatically putting the tags you use against a post in the meta keywords header and the “excerpt” of a post in the meta description. Meta data is still used by some search engines, and this is a zero effort way of improving your rankings in those engines once it’s set up.

Something else I noticed is that if you search for your name, your old site comes up second for me. It would be beneficial if you set up a permanent redirect to show Google that this is where you now live. That way all the Google juice your old site had should be passed on.

As a side, I checked the rankings of my site, The Atheist, and I’m about fifth in Google for the term “atheist blog”. So I must be doing something right!

I found this site on the bottom of the third page when searching for “friendly atheist” and the top of the fifth page when searching for “hemant mehta” — and tellingly, the snippet from both is also the summary of this post! Perhaps if you used both phrases more in your site, it would improve. Your current standing for these terms is almost certainly a factor of how many sites link to yours.

Here are a few suggestions.
- the title of your site is just an image, and a background image at that, so there’s not even an “alt” attribute that you can stuff some text in. You’ll get a boost right away I bet if you include “friendly atheist” in an h1 header tag. A Fahrner Image Replacement might be what you need.

- Follow Cat’s Staff’s advice and wherever there are images in your design, include your terms in the alt attribute, and include your terms in the title attribute for any links. For instance, your header right now is wrapped with a link to provide users a way back to the main page, add “Friendly Atheist” as a title attribute and you’ve already increased the term usage by 33%. Update the titles for the existing navigation links from “FAQ” to “Friendly Atheist FAQ”, etc.

- Like Aerik said, add some meta tags (keywords and description). These certainly aren’t critical any more, but they’re not exactly deprecated. They’re good to include — and you don’t either right now, so they would only help.

You’ll have a slightly higher hill to climb with “hemant mehta” because you’re competing with your own fame, like Chas said. There are a lot of references out there to your name that refer to your book or interviews instead of the site, and you’ll have to compete with those. You might try things like replacing the title tag for your “Contact Me” button with “Contact Hemant Mehta”, and so on.

I do not subscribe to any spamming or link exchange and used my keyword in the META TAGS on each page.