It's going to be the page your visitor wants to see, not your whole site, and you can always have a link back to your home page and a phone number, or other contact info, on each of the other pages in your site.
My Meta Tags start with the name of the home page, ie; Morgans Specialty Hardware, then I show where it's at, ie; in Harrisburg! This identifies the name/type and city or area of the city, then I list the ???
Why not just go to a simple local business site and look up the page source, so why not take a look at Johnskeys.com then right click and select page source to see how I set up the meta tags. And notice the second meta line where it says "charset" followed by utf-8 instead of the normal windows 1252. This will automatically show modern international characters instead of the old prosaic characters and provide you with more potential views.
If you do the same type of thing with each page of your site, showing just the identity of that page, listed after your business name, that will serve the different identity, ie; neighborhood or town, or type of property, you can direct local searches directly to that page since each page should have a separate identity so visitors can go directly to what interests them.
This type of local search criteria is kind of new and not too well understood, but it may be just what you need.
You see, the Broad search doesn't work well for local search, so you might see some immediate improvement once your changes are indexed by Google. Basically all you really want to do is to direct searchers to the exact information they are looking for, and for your home page, simply show your company name and what you do on the title meta and get specific on each other page so searchers get directed there.
This should work out well for you since a single page identity for your site limits your visitors ability to find "Their Information."
SEO and Local Search work differently, and SEO relys a great deal on BackLinks, while backlinks have little or nothing to do for local search.
If you'll take a look at: DugA.us/Online PP2.htm and go down the center column to "Truth Three" you'll get an idea of what I mean as it relates to Local Search.
I know you're doing this yourself, but most people would rather spend money than learn to do their own work.
Good for you.
If you wish to contact me directly you are welcome to email me at the email address on DugA.
John
Google is also scrambling and rotating search results so don't count on steady results anymore.
If the drop exactly coincided with changes you made, it's probably easier to diagnose, though recovery may take some time. Sometimes just a random Google human review can have dramatic effects on a site's ranking, particularly if spider deceiving tricks were in place (like cloaking)
If you accidentally changed the actual URL of a page, it is then effectively seen as brand new content (any incoming backlink power is lost as well), or content another site stole, just changing anchor text (in your menus?) might be enough to throw off the spiders and make it look like new content that has not yet earned any ranking.
Your website has been hit by google updates or recent algorithmic changes.
One of my websites just got pushed back to page 3 and 4 on 20 keyword searches and this happened overnight. I have been going through the site and changing things since we added a new IDX so I had to add the maps to all 200 listings and in so doing I changed the articles and added some keywords such as Wilmette Realtor in the custom doc title that wasn't there before. The article title may have been "Homes for sale on Elm Street and I changed the doc title to Homes for sale on Elm Street | Willmemette Realtor.
Since this has happened I have also gone through and started to de-optimized the articles by changing the anchor text of the links leading to more homes for sale in Willmette (where as that was the anchor text) and now I am writing click here as the anchor text so it would read see more homes for sale in Willmette click here.
Is Google penalizing for using keywords in the anchor text?
Thanks,
John
