Why is my site going from bad to worse in the SERPS?

[mr_w]

I've been having issues ranking for the key word kayak fishing. At one point a few months ago I managed to get my site www.yakangler.com to page 2 but have since fallen back to page 20+. I thought it was because of keyword stuffing or over optimization so I made some tweaks to my home page and started to see a small daily rise but stopped at page 19. I have since slipped back to the top of page 24...  What am I doing wrong? I don't employ any blackhat linking, I know I have some W3C validation errors on my home page "many caused by the facebook like button". Any ideas on how to improve my SERPS would be greatly appreciated.

The most frustrating thing is comparing my site to the top Google searches for that key word...  I should be doing fine definitely not page 24!

Much gratitude in advance for any help you can offer!

[jws8118]

Have you checked Google Webmaster tools to make sure you didn't get hit with a penalty.  Although you may not be engaged in any black hat SEO that doesn't mean you couldn't have been a victim of negative SEO by a competitor or even that some SEO tactics you previously employed have now been devalued or penalized.

I would check to see if you have any warnings in WMT and report back here and I can help you more from that point.

[mr_w]

James thanks for the help! I checked WMT and the only messages I had were 2 server outages I had one last month and the other on the 18. The outage was only for a couple of hours. The SERP rankings have fallen way before these messages. There are not other warnings other then some 500 errors and 404's etc.

[EEE3]

Hi Mark,

What are you doing to get external links to your website? Check out some of the page 1 competitor listings for your targeted keyword using Open Site Explorer. The people ahead of you may have a longer list of quality links, older domain age, more social shares, etc.

Check out what your competitors are doing, and if it's white hat and great for users on your website, try to replicated it on your own.

Also, you have a lot of great content and sections on your website. I really enjoyed finding the kayak fishing reports--though at first I was confused because I was expecting to see regional weather reports for kayakers in those designated areas (probably because I'm not a kayak fisher).

Regardless, these reports are really fun to read and I think you should leverage them more in your SEO. We all know that thoughtfully created user content is beneficial, and you seem to have a lot of that. I would optimize this page http://www.yakangler.com/submit-content with more content about "Submit your kayak fishing stories" and text about how to do so on your site, examples of what you're looking for, etc. Currently the page says it will auto-close in 5 seconds but doesn't.

Also consider changing the anchor text in your footer link for "Links"
Though you link that anchor text to legitimate links, Google bots may not be able to understand that, and may think you are in fact trying out some blackhat when you're not, as you said. Try changing it to "helpful resources" or something similar.

Hope some of these suggestions help.

[mr_w]

Thanks for your input, The top 5 domains all have "Kayak Fishing" in their URL so they all have many links tagged with that key word, where as we do not because it wouldn't be natural. I could understand why this would cause us to not be on the first page but page 23?

Here is the top result in site explorer: http://awesomescreenshot.com/02b12w4n5c

Here is us: http://awesomescreenshot.com/02112w4fdd

Grrr, and may of the top links are what I would consider spammy, directories or article submissions sites.

Will we never be able to beat them because they get the key word in their anchor texts because of the site name?

Non of the top 5 listings have a larger social media presence then us, in fact many don't do any social media.

I updated the links menu at the bottom to say "helpful sites"

Also how long should I wait between SEO changes to see if there were any positive or negative movement. My site has been fluctuating from page 19 on Monday to page 23 today...

[EEE3]

It takes at least a month in my experience to see changes showing in search results. I also see a lot of fluctuation in client accounts, so definitely look at average ranking trends over a longer period of time.

Also, there are few external links to your website for the term "kayak fishing" http://awesomescreenshot.com/03112whz3f

It's true the other domains all have kayak fishing in their urls, but you also have links with that term in your URLs too site:yakangler.com/kayak-fishing

I would recommend trying to get links from quality domains using anchor text Kayak fishing and other phrases incorporating Kayak Fishing ("submit kayak fishing stories" for example), and linking back to the relevant pages on your website plus a few links to the home page.

Just don't overdo it and keep it natural. You may even want to check in with a few Chamber of Commerce websites or local city/town websites, as they may be looking for content or resources for people who want to kayak in their area.

Best of luck to you!