excels at mediocrity

I don’t think it’s a myth. We have a couple of websites that i beleive are in the sandbox right now. One is an older Home and Garden site that we recently have done a lot of optimization and expansion on. The other, an ATV Accessories website is just a few months old. Both are struggling with google rankings. The new website especially ranks well for obscure items but for the most popular terms we are optimizing for we cannot be found. After analysis of competitors that are ranking for those terms… we beleive we are doing a much better job of playing by the rules and optimizing better. The only explanation I have is that we are in some sort of sandbox. I’ve been involved with SEO on my websites for years and we are doing everything the right way as far as I can tell – at least what we have done has helped other websites of ours to rank well. So I guess we sit back and wait for them to let us out of the sandbox. The odd thing is, and I’m not sure if this is related at all – we can’t get dmoz to list either of these websites. We have tried listing in multiple categories. Our older website was listed, but suddenly dropped year or so ago. SEO can be really frustrating sometimes. Any thoughts on how to get out of the sandbox or get listed in Dmoz are appreciated. For right now we’re just optimizing more, adding more product and trying to get more external links so that when we are released we’ll be a bit more seasoned.