USA Today has written a story about how a website owner who wasn't having any luck with her website got noticed by Google.  USA Today had the president of a website consulting firm look at the website to see what tips he could give the owner about her site design.  In a nutshell, her site was lacking content and keywords of any kind.  There weren't many links coming in to the site either, so he gave the site owner some pointers on building up linkage.

I don't agree with everything that the consultant told her.  But for a beginner, the advice was a decent first step.  But you'd think the president of a consulting firm could offer a few more pointers.  He did point her to Google's Keyword Tool.  But there are a lot of other things that could have been done to the site to make it rank higher in Google.

I guess the tactics paid off, though.  If you do a Google search for the site owner's identified keyword phrase, she does show up (which is more than she could say before getting the consulting advice).