So, I have been working on my brothers site “Busters Blinds” optimization for last 6 months. At one point in time were number 1 for our target keyword, but had then slipped to number 10.

Being not that of a competitive space I was pissed for the drop in rankings. I thought it was a canonicalization issue or lack of link building. So, i fixed the canonicalization issue and built up their inbound link profile. I let 1 to 2 months go by and no improvement.

Now I was ultra pissed. I didn’t get it. So, instead of freaking out I went back to the basics.

• Does the keyword appear on the page?
• Does the site have an keyword rich h1 tag?
• Are my title tags and meta tags optimized?

By asking these three basic, but extremely important questions I found the problem. The homepage did not contain a keyword rich h1 and the target keyword only appeared in the text once. (I think my brother had removed or modified the original optimization at some point in time).

So, I implemented an keyword rich h1 and optimized the homepage text with the target keyword. 2 weeks later BAM results. Number 1 placement for our target keyword across all data centers! (make sure to use this tool for checking all data centers).

So, if you are having a hard time in your seo campaign. Take a step back. Take a deep breath. Go back to the basic of search engine optimization and ask yourself:

• Does the keyword appear on the page?
• Does the site have an keyword rich h1 tag?
• Are my title tags and meta tags optimized?