My site has been consistently at about #30-40 on Google over the past month for the terms "promotional products" and "promotional items" and noticed I suddenly was at 61 today. Am I being penalized or is this just a google bump?
Are you actively building backlinks with the anchor text "promotional products" and "promotional items" ? It may help your onpage SEO if you have these keywords in the visible text your visitors see. I only see "promotional products" in your meta keyword tag and "promotional items" does not appear anywhere. I just looked at your homepage, so if another page is ranking for these terms please disregard. To answer your question, a drop in serps is normal - especially for the keywords in relation to your homepage. A penalty would likely knock you down much further or cause your site to be deindexed. Good luck with your site
The keywords meta element is no longer used by major search engines due to abuse in the past, really it's an ineffective method that just refuses to die in the SEO communities mind.
thanks I do build plenty of backlinks with both terms in blogs, pr releases, forum comments, ezine articles and directories. Can't do much more.
Which page lost the rankings for those keyphrases? If it is your homepage you are trying to rank for those keyphrases, you will have a difficult time doing so. The keyphrases need to appear on the visible part of your page, and right now your homepage has a 0% keyword density for the keyphrases you noted above.
I track about 70 keywords. It is perfectly normal (and common) for keywords in that ranking range to go up or to drop by double digits from one day to the next. I've lost track of the many times it has happened to my pages. In a few days or a week or so they seem to come back to near the original rankings.
I must have looked at the other URL in you sig. oops Google could be rebuilding its database. Have you checked other Google datacenters for your position? For promotional products, you onpage SEO is pretty good. A quick check of your site vs the top competitors reveals: Number 1 & 2 ranked for promotional products have a 6-7% bold keyword density. Your homepage has 0. Number 1 site has promotional products listed three times in meta description. Your homepage has 1 occurance. Number 1 site uses promotional products one time for image alt text. Your homepage 0. Your CSS is over 2,800 bytes. It's preferred to link this to a stylesheet. That's all the major issues my software reports. Good luck...
Those are very helpful points...thanks Number 1 & 2 ranked for promotional products have a 6-7% bold keyword density. Your homepage has 0. What is this Number 1 site has promotional products listed three times in meta description. Your homepage has 1 occurance. Number 1 site uses promotional products one time for image alt text. Your homepage 0. How can I control this? Your CSS is over 2,800 bytes. It's preferred to link this to a stylesheet. Have to discuss this with my host service
I will PM you the onpage SEO report download link (PDF). What the software does is compare your onpage seo to those of the top 10 ranking Websites in Google. It analyzes keyword density, keyword positioning, H1 usage, and many other factors. It's a comprehensive report that can be useful in making educated onpage SEO decisions. I hope it helps...