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Good Morning! I would suggest taking a look at the Moz post on On-page Ranking Factors, in particular roughly at the bottom of the page there is a portion titled "An Ideally Optimized Webpage" which is almost a TLDR of the entire article and in my opinion spells out the structure of a perfect internal linking scheme very well. I personally think it is natural that some of your pages may overlap what your homepage is optimized for. Obviously the more focused your homepage is, the better, but I try and make my homepage as specific as I can while still allowing me wiggle room to expand on the topic throughout the website. For some reason I always imagine the Taxonomy trees from my old Biology classes. On another note a lot of Homepages will integrate a blog feed so that their content is continuously changing. Google is smart, and is always learning. I personally think we are slowly moving away from the days of designing/writing FOR Google. I try and organize everything in a way that my dad would understand. If he can figure out what my website is about, or how to get around, Google can. (keep in mind with my previous statement, we still have to play by Googles rules and Best Practice for SEO, but just my own thoughts) Hope that helps a little!

Great information!  Thanks!  I will act on this and make some progress. I can't believe our h1 tag (all this time) has been seen as one word FingersDueling Pianos!

I agree with Joey. Most prepositions are stop words, so they may carry less weight in the search algorithm. That's not to say they aren't important. I just searched "sporting goods stores in Atlanta" and "sporting goods stores Atlanta" and got very slightly different results for each. The on page optimization suggestions are just suggestions to point you in the right direction based on keywords you entered into the tool. You should never sacrifice usability for your readers in order to satisfy an SEO tool. The tool is just a starting point.

Hi There It's tough to give specifics without seeing the exact page and site. But in general, this is something I have seen sometimes. It's possible Google re-ranked the newer page highly to test for user metrics like click-through-rate, dwell time and "pogosticking" - maybe the user metrics didn't go so well so they dropped it back down. Here's the question too - it's important to note that if Google actually crawled and re-cached the page with the new design when re-ranking. I would recommend always checking the cache date so you can tie the ranking timing to which version of the page they are ranking. Also, another thought - when you updated the page, did you give it a social push and/or did it get lots of traffic from other sources too? Sometimes I've seen Google rank a page higher while it's getting social attention and then drop it back down after the social attention goes away.