Search engines are taking so much pride for returning quality results.. THEY ARE NOT !!! My site is ranking the first page for they "keyword".. but when typing in "free + 'keyword'" it is not even on the first 30 pages... My site is probably the best existing site for the "keyword" and it only ranks well just for this "keyword" words .. for any other combination including "keyword" it does not show up at all.. while totally crappy unrelated sites are there.. Anyway I can improve the site being rank for the variety of combinations with the "keyword" ?
Yes, you can do variation of keywords maybe that one of the reason why your some keywords is not ranking.
There are a lot of things that could make your phrases rank higher, or other sites higher then yours. As always, build solid content and backlinks to help with your ranking.
I tried to improve my ranks for the other keywords by improving backlinks.. I decided to go quality link directories route.. But the results were completely opposite of what I expected.. Not only my site started to rank better for other keywords.. I lost my #3 position on the keyword I used to rank well.. Now I am #11 Last week I submitted my site to a number of quality directories.. at least they used to be considered quality in the prior Panda/Penguin world Here is the list: 1) dir.yahoo.com 2) Seoma.net 3) AsListed.com 4) HotVsNot.com 5) JoeAnt.com 6) Links-Guru.com 7) CanLinks.net 8) BizDirUSA.com 9) References.net 10) DirGenius.com <--- this is a shady one 11) a1webdirectory.org I submitted the site in a period of 3-5 days.. A few days after my site dropped from #3 to #11 in Google.. Is this a direct result of submitting to these directories? Is this how bad link directories have become?