A Sudden Drop in Keyword Ranking but why?

[chrissmithps]

Hi,

I wondered if anyone has ever experienced anything like this before, one of our customers has a website JDB Events (http://www.jdb-events.com/). When he first came to us he was using Fast Hosts and he was experiencing down time pretty much every day in periods of up to an hour.

The first step before carrying out any SEO was to place the website on our VPS so that the downtime issue was resolved. It did resolve the issue and the speed of the website was also increased.

My next issue was to address the length of the Title on the home page because it was 157 characters, I usually keep these to 70 characters.

This is the old Meta Title:

JDB Events Limited - Event, Production & AV Hire Specialists | The West Midlands Dance Floor Hire, LED Furniture, DJ, Disco Hire & Event Services Specialists

Here is the my new Meta Title:

JDB Events | LED Furniture Hire for Parties and Corporate Events

I have attached a screenshot of the drop that I have experienced, would anyone recommend that it's ok to keep the title longer so that I can cram more search terms into it, I use Woo Rank as a bench mark and this recommends shortening the title but I would be interested in hearing anyone's views.

Other steps that I have taken:

• Shortened the home page description
• WWW Resolve
• Added Robots.txt
• Crawled all of the pages for 404 errors etc

The next step I'm thinking of taking is replacing the amended meta title and description for the old one and monitoring that, other than that I can't see why I have taken such a hit.

Thanks

NewServerSpeedTest.png OldServerSpeedTest.png Rankings.png

[TheZenAgency]

Hi

I always believe page title's should be written with the user in mind. When they are on google SERP you would like them to click through and find a page which matches both the page title and meta description that they have seen. The idea of "cramming" more keywords into a title would not be something i would be looking to ever do.

As Moz says "The title element of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content"

Stick to this and you shouldnt go far wrong. When did you change the title? You may just require a bit of patience for Google rankings

[chrissmithps]

Thanks for taking the time to reply, I changed it around 3 weeks ago. I will leave it a few more days and re-think my Strategy.

Regards

[DennisSeymour]

The title will not have that big of an impact to drop your rankings. I go with 65 chars, but 70 is fine. Your meta keywords area is spammed to death though lol so you might want to minimize that. Is the drop huge though? It's hard to say how you can get a big drop with tweaks like that.

[chrissmithps]

Thanks for your reply Dennis, I thought my title and description had less spam than the previous but I will defiantly look into changing these.

One of the search terms "starlit dance floor hire" has dropped 44 places on Google and usually I wouldn't be as concerned but since starting the SEO they have been receiving half of the enquiries than when I started. It may just be a coincidence or the time of year.

I will go back to the drawing board with the title and description.

Thanks Again.

[DonnaDuncan]

chrissmithps,

This might also be link or algorithm update related. Have you taken a look at your inbound links and link metrics recently? It appears as though the site has very few. Did it previously have more? Do you have any warnings in Google Webmaster tools?

[DennisSeymour]

I was referring to your meta keywords, not the title/descriptions

For keywords like that, I would look at what changed with the results. Does it show local results now or does it show more images which could've pushed you down.

That's a big drop so it could be because the title got changed. You might've ranked there mainly because of your title tag (even without links) so you might want to try to incorporate that into the title again or do a completely separate page for it.

[JVRudnick]

most recent best practices say title length should be around 56 chars...fyi....

have you checked your own length? it's 64 chars...AND you make the newbie mistake of putting brand before keywords....

I'd change that to be this (55 chars!)

"LED Furniture Hire for Parties & Corporate Events | JDB"

[chrissmithps]

Hi Donna,

Thanks for the response, I have checked Google Webmaster and there are no errors. The link metrics are the same as when I started the project.

Regards

[chrissmithps]

Thanks for the response, I have taken your suggestion into account and swapped the position of the brand and the keywords.

I'll let you know how I get on.

Thanks

Chris