Google and Home-hosted WP Blog

I have WordPress installed on a mac (10.4.3) here at home and all works fine. I have a PageRank of 5, and have scoured the internet for SEO tips and used most of them. My page is WC3 validated, 80% indexed by Google (strangely enough, after signing up for the Google Sitemaps service posts have seemingly stopped being indexed…), and hit by googlebot at least a few dozen times every day. Searches on MSN and Yahoo bring me some traffic, but Google almost never does.

The problem is exemplified when comparing to a wordpress.com hosted blog. I cross-posted some entries, and the wordpress.com entries always show up within the first few pages of results when searching for their titles. My home-hosted main blog is about 15-20 pages back, for the same entries. I have permalinks enabled and everything!

Here is Paperback Writer (home-hosted) and here is Day Tripper (wordpress.com). Try searching ‘silence of a silver wing’ (without quotes) [a poem…] as an example.

edit: silence of a silver wing search