Thursday, April 07, 2005

Killed by an apostrophe...

I've got a page about Dunns River Falls in Jamaica which for a long time was number 1-3 in Google and got lots of traffic. The problem was that it was REALLY ugly I used a front page photo gallery which forced me to use my old domain name rather than the www.sandalspictures.com domain. Awhile back I redid the page with static html and created an easier page to look at. Since then traffic has dropped signicantly and when I did google searches I could not find the page. I ran a meta tag analyzer at www.widexl.com and found that it couldn't even see my key words "Dunn's River Falls" it was pulling all kinds of sets of three words but not those despite the fact that they are repeated quite a bit. Today I decided to change the key words and removed the ' from Dunn's and make them all Dunns River Falls. I did this because through the overture keyword analyzer I could see that more people search without the ' so I figured what the heck. Bam I reran the analyzer and my Dunns River Falls keywords showed all at once. Not knowing this basically killed my page in the SERPS. In the future screw punctuation when it is in my key words. I also made this change on my Sandals Dunns River page figuring the same problem had occurred. Hopefully both come back up in the SERPS.