Why our site dropped in rank for a main keyword

[BobGW]

Hello,

Our site

nlpca(dot)com

dropped in rank for a few terms, including the main term "NLP". Could you look at our site and tell us what might be the cause?

Thank you so much,

Bob

[EGOL]

Have you made any changes?

Has the site that moved above you been doing SEO?

[Prospector-Plastics]

Hi Bob,

Use this tool in SEOMoz - http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization

As I suspected by simply looking at your homepage, the term NLP appears very frequently most likely affecting keyword density. To search engines, it looks like keyword stuffing.

Running the report check in SEOMoz confirms this. Once place in particular is your <title>tag:</p> <p><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> California and Utah | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Training | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Certification | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Courses</span></p> <p><span>You might try something instead like:<br /></span><span style="background-color: initial;">NLP Institute of California | Training, Certification and Courses</span></p> <p>Also, NLP is a very broad term that is probably highly competitive - for example, Google shows 84 million results for the term. It might be better to do some keyword research and focus on more targeted terms - perhaps in your case, NLP Training. I also assume NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming (oddly I covered this topic as my senior research project in college). On your homepage, that term does not appear.</p> <p>Something that might help others answer your question - when did the drop in ranking occur and did you make any changes to your website shortly before the rank drop?</p></title>

[BobGW]

It's dropped enough that it's not other sites doing SEO. Lately I've been carefully adding a phrase here and there to our articles'  copy to match the keywords in our titles. A while back I added "and Utah" to our home page title tag, but that was a couple of months ago. No striking changes that I can see. We have 2 other sites and all sites have an "Our other sites" link to interconnect, but that's never been a problem before.

Any help is greatly appreciated