SEO optimization big time issue

I am unsure if we're the only ones seeing this...but:

For the beginning we did not gave too much importance to the Google's search results ranking for our website, because it was 'young' and fresh in terms of indexed pages, links to it etc...
But when other new websites appeared with the same products as ours and the same texts(!), and in less than a week after being indexed they get way above us in Google's results for the same query, it doesn't look good at all.
I am not a SEO expert, but, for every product we added we've put in all the fields (including meta title and name - which I don't think it matters for Google anyway).

We've painfully discovered that no matter how much we would pay for a good, fast and reliable hosting, we still need a lot of money to pay to AdWords to get orders, simply because querying in Google doesn't show our web pages and products in the top results - which, of course, is not happening for others. Even a plain simple, dummy PHP free platform would get over us in search results raking with no effort at all...

We're using NOP 1.6, and I am talking about pages indexed in March 2010...

Please confirm or infirm if others observed the above. If anyone succeeded in solving (even partially) this type of issues, please help!

We are seriously thinking to switch the platform, tough we like the way and how we worked with Nop so far...

adrian, I think it maybe something to do with your language settings (if you are using the store in a language other than english)

have a read a these :

https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/1039/seo-and-multilingual-pages.aspx

and

http://nopcommerce.codeplex.com/workitem/9074

Thanks for that, I will definitely have it on our list when doing the 1.9 upgrade.

I totally agree with you, Google takes a lot from our profits, and I am ok with that as long as we have a good conversion rate.
What I was trying to emphasize through my post was, that, many other new web stores, with less technical features, less work, less time, poorer product images and descriptions(or even identical with ours), get on top of our store in Google's search results with less effort. That costs us more adwords clicks and I think it's a SEO issue or, as haydie suggested it might be a config issue...

In case anyone else reads this:

We did changed the web site locale to our local language as haydie suggested,(previously was en-US), and, along with the upgrade from 1.6 to 1.9, it was completely reindexed by google (for the first time in a year).

We also started to promote our store on facebook, twitter, and all the important social network sites - this made the difference for how fast google indexed us. And, we also updated the Sitemapseo.aspx to say that the update frequency is "always" instead of the default "weekly".

And... surprise... we're now almost all the times on the first page (very often the first result) for many queries related to our products.

In conclusion, I can definitely say that Nop is working very well when correctly configured :)

Great job Nop team! Thank you all!