When you're new to SEO, it's tricky enough to understand which keywords you should be trying for. When your efforts don't have the effect you expect, it's even worse. Fortunately, there's often some kind of explanation, as the original poster of this week's thread learned. Be sure to stop by the thread and share your experience.
Josephbm91 Hello all. So I'm very new to SEO. My site is about 2 months old. Originally I had "small business," "web design" and "tyler tx" as my main keywords. After about a month and a half, that got me to #1 for "small business web design tyler tx." After a while I realized that was getting me no clicks, so I thought it was time to move on. The only possible thing I was doing in terms of linking was just going hardcore on forum posting. I thought those links didn't count much though. Anyway, before I began to switch keywords up,I got up to #10 for "website design tyler tx", which was a pretty big deal to me, and I was really happy about it. I was also #16 for "web design tyler tx." Those are the most important phrases for the niche I'm working with. I decided that "website design tyler tx" would be my next push. So I used "website design" and "tyler tx" as my new keywords, changed my page titles and everything. The next week, my site fell from #10 to #23 for "website design tyler tx," although the page is optimized for that specific phrase. Although I'm upset about it, I was just experimenting to gain experience, so there's no way I could've known it was going to happen. I would just like a little insight to understand why this happened so I can avoid it again. Thank you!
careercubicle Hi, It is very simply that before you were using long tail keywords; that's why your website had good ranks. Long tail keywords always have less competitors. Now you are using "website Design" and other keywords. I think these keywords might have a greater number of competitors. It will take some times to come up with a good rank. Keep link building and try to do good on page SEO work.
RichInJapan In terms of fluctuations that's not a huge one and you may find that your site creeps up the rankings again. It's also worth remembering that during any SEO experiment it's very difficult to precisely gauge the effect of changes which have been made. There are two key reasons for this. Firstly, changes aren't immediately considered by Google and it's entirely possible that there could be a considerable lag between a given change and its affect on rankings. Secondly, and probably most importantly, we don't have the ability to freeze all other conditions in the experiment; every one of your competitors is likely to have a webmaster who is also trying to improve their site's ranking. It's entirely possible that a site which has received sensible SEO-driven changes to actually drop in the SERPs simply because competitors have also been modifying their sites. To be honest, I'm not sure if this reply has really been helpful, but what I'm trying to say is that you should be very careful when trying to associate specific changes to your site with absolute results in the SERPs. Oh, I agree with the long tail keywords comment. If you plan on increasing the number of pages on your site then you'll be able to cast your net a bit further in terms of page titles etc - but I'd refrain from doing this purely for SEO purposes as site usability must always take precedence.
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