I’m doing optimization of a website for my work, however I’m not sure what i am doing wrong. First of all, I base my rankings based on google maps/google places, so that’s where we are trying to get ourselves listed, and based on the page number and assigned letter to our listing that’s how we’re figuring out how we rank, is there a better way of doing this, finding out how you rank based on certain keywords?
Also how does a ranking go down in google lower then it was when we first started optimizing the website? before it had no h1 tags, no titles on any of the pages, some content and hardly any backlinks, but now it’s ranking a few pages lower then it was before we even started modifying the webpage for search engines, what did we do wrong?
You can use tools to monitor your ranking position for keywords (search this forum for repeated questions on what tools to use). But remember, other people will MOST LIKELY see different results based on their location, cookies etc.
Ranking can go down for a number of reasons: increased competitor behavior/activity, reduction from the Query Deserves Freshness boost (your content/site going stale) and so on.
A site would sure help in answering your question.
You are assuming all other site are not improving their rankings when you say your site went down in rankings. It is possible your site made no progress and the others improved.
without a reference to your site to rule it out I would think you may have spammed your site.
It may also be possible that the links you added had a negative effect on your ranking.
Rankings fluctuate constantly, sometimes more from certain KWs than others. So you’re going to see your site change in the rankings, get used to that. You might dip for a few days/weeks but then bounce back to where you were or higher.
It’s pretty difficult for a site to “lock in” a certain ranking position when you’re starting out with optimising it. But over time your site will gain authority and you’ll see the rankings start to stabilise, and hopefully rise.