>>For a couple of years our sites were listed as #1 or #2 ...
It is very important to remember that ODP search DOESN'T RANK SITES!
It returns the sites in some random order, and nobody has ever published any kind of rationale for that order (or any way to affect that order, favorably or not, for any site). You could have the best "Chiral Handcrafted Widgets" in this arm of the galaxy, listed in 17 categories, cooled in 8 of them, deep-linked 400 times -- and STILL end up showing after some thirteen-year-old-kid's Madonna fan site containing nothing but a picture of her pretending to do something obscene with a CHW.
Trust us on this. No real search engine is going to do anything with dmoz.org's search results. They pay the big bucks for the directory and the links. And as for searchers, hardly anyone but ODP editors and webmasters does searches here.
Now you can get an amazing amount of information out of
that primitive search tool, if you know a bit about ODP.
And I personally do use ODP search to actually find
sites...sometimes the sites that I know I added last year.
But I very much doubt if there are more than 100,000 people
who have EVER used ODP search for general web searching.
(Yahoo will have that many unique visitors in an afternoon.)
And, last time I saw "page views" figures for ODP, "approximately all" of the day's page views could
have been accounted for by the number of listings added
by editors that day.
So, don't worry about trying to optimize for ODP search -- it won't work and wouldn't matter if it did. Concentrate on Google and Inktomi, with an eye out for new search engines.