• I'm Not A Doctor, Tuesday, April 1, 2008 12 PM

"The Doc" (a search consultant based in San Diego) was working on a site that had consistently ranked within the top three organic results for a keyword, when one day he noticed it had slipped down to the tenth spot. At first, he thought that there might be duplicate content issues, a possible need to tweak the URL structure for canonicalization or maybe just build up more inbound links.

But after fiddling with those factors and waiting about a month, there was still no change. Frustrated, the Doc found that sometimes snagging rankings means going back to three basic questions: Does the keyword appear on the page? Does the site have a keyword rich h1 tag? And are the title tags and Meta data optimized? "By asking these three basic, but extremely important questions I found the problem," the Doc says. "The homepage did not contain a keyword rich h1 and the target keyword only appeared in the text once."

He added the target keyword to the h1 tags, sprinkling it into the homepage text as well, and saw the site return to the top three rankings within two weeks. "So, if you are having a hard time in your SEO campaign, take a step back," the Doc says. "Take a deep breath. Go back to the basics."

Read the whole story at I'm Not A Doctor »