My site has dropped three places in one day i do not understand it

[JaredBroker]

Hey Diane,

This may have been one of those little algorithm tweaks Google is so fond of.  They may be playing with their exact match domain strength.

The important thing is to not panic!  Get a couple of quality links, or maybe go vertical with a quick video, which could do well if you embed it.

You could also write a post about gastric band hypnotherapy and point the anchor text to the page that normally ranks, or link from content that already exists.

Also, you could throw your keyword in the H1 tag.

You're right, those other sites are garbage!

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for that. can you give me an example of the keywords in the h1 tag, sorry new at all this. i thought i had put the keywords into h1 but maybe i am wrong.

i have been considering about putting a video on the site but i did not know if this would slow the site down and also if it helps with ranking or not. i did read somewhere where it said that videos are good on sites but then people responded by saying it makes no difference so i did not know what to think.

would the video have to be something i made or maybe a video that is already out there on the subject

[KeriMorgret]

Jared, I'm seeing her keyword phrase in the H1 tag; can you explain what you meant?

Diane, all of the links in Q&A are nofollowed, so putting in anchor text in your questions in Q&A won't help your site, and the admins often remove them anyway.

I'd remove the spammy-looking screen of text with all of those cities at the bottom of the page, that's not going to help you at all.

You appear to have a broken image on that page as well, at the very bottom that links to In2Town. That link doesn't make sense either, as it says that there is free advertising there with the directories, but I know from previous questions you're targeting that site as a lifestyle magazine.

If you're concerned about page load time, take a look at your image size and resize the images before they're on the page, not in the code. That one about the results is quite large and could be probably 1/10 the file size that it is now without a problem.

[ClaireH-184886]

I done what you said and done some press releases and it is now back to normal. a bit of a scare for a minute. many thanks

[ClaireH-184886]

hi no i was not putting it on here for a link i was making it easier for people to click it so they could see the problem.

The bottom of the site is a major headache for me. i am trying to get people to know the areas that we cover but i cannot find another better way of doing it and for months now i have been racking my brain of finding a better way of doing it. if you have any suggestions then that would be great.

the broken image is something that we are sorting out at the moment

where is it saying about free advertising. i am confused, there should be nothing there saying that. please point this out as this is worrying.

can you please explain about the following and what site it is on please and how we can solve this

If you're concerned about page load time, take a look at your image size and resize the images before they're on the page, not in the code. That one about the results is quite large and could be probably 1/10 the file size that it is now without a problem.

[ClaireH-184886]

just found the image, that is something i cannot understand. not sure why that has appeared, this is something we removed a long time ago. thanks for finding that.

[KeriMorgret]

If you use Firefox to view your site, right click on an image and select view image info. You'll see something like the screenshot below, which shows you the size of all of the images on that page, both in dimensions and in the size of the file.

Here's a good Whiteboard Friday about image optimization in general, and it talks about image file size.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday

Here is an in-depth post about site speed. Don't worry about the advanced stuff, mainly look at the tools to use to find the load speed of your page.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/optimizing-page-speed-actionable-tips-for-seos-and-web-developers

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The part about directories was in the alt or title tag for the image itself; I can't reference it now that you've removed the image reference.

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Regarding the links at the bottom..look in your analytics, do you get anybody coming in on organic traffic using any city-related words? If not, you know for sure it isn't working. Also consider just removing it on all your pages for a week and see what happens.

M2dTO.jpg

[ClaireH-184886]

hi we get a great deal of traffic because we have the cities there and get a huge responce from people calling because they put it in the search engine to find someone near them. so my problem is, it looks messy but it brings us a load of traffic and customers and i am trying to work out a way to make it look better as it looks messy

[onlinemediadirect]

We have also been experiencing some changes in rankings recently and are changing tactics on our link building tactics.

[ClaireH-184886]

hi Gary. what link building tactics have you been using

[onlinemediadirect]

We have been using a wide variety but I think the main problem has been using to many of the same keyword. I need to mix it up with a wider selection 2 to 3 keywords plus the site name also linking in.

Article links and guest blog posts are also tactics we are now using.

[cbpayne]

Can I just make a generic comment. Webmasters 'can't understand" it when a site goes from from, say 1st to 5th and consider that something must be wrong. Yet are not surprised when a site goes from 5th to 1st. I don't get it!