I have had a solid position for my targeted keyword in Google for the past few months. This past week I dropped 5 places and I am in jeopardy of falling off page one. I have not done anything different except sponsor wordpress templates and submitted to a a few directories. Can one of those two methods I listed above be the problem? I update and do on page seo each day as i always have.
SERP position easy change even you're at 1st page for a few months. It happen to me a lot so just work hard more on backlink development for that selected keyword.
Did any of the templates you sponsored take off? If you got a lot of new backlinks and weren't in a very strong position (especially if they all have the same anchor text) you're often dropped a bit in the rankings for awhile and then boost up farther higher than before.