Midhurst - 10:26 am on May 11, 2004 (gmt 0)

Webnewton,
You may have a point, about relatively uncompeted-for terms.
The websites which I referred to in my first post are both technical sites.
The bigger of the two sites has 100 pages, each page devoted to a particular technical matter - the title of a page is generally either a single or two-word technical term.
These terms are searched for between 200 and 2000 times each month worldwide.But, there are masses of small websites in the sector.

I checked some further inside pages today and the Google - Yahoo results are almost identical now - they have not been like this for several months.
BUT THIS IS THE BIG SURPRISE!
YESTERDAY, TRAFFIC TO THE SITE WENT UP 300%
All the inside pages appear to have moved back up to where they were several month's ago.
YES! I LOST TRAFFIC BY THE SAME AMOUNT THEN.
This site has had NO, I repeat NO, optimization changes since Feb.
So, what's going on here?

Because of your observation about competed-for terms, I checked on another niche-market site with massive international competition for the 4-word keyphrase (but interestingly only 4500 searches last month - which factor does Google note most: the number of websites competing for the traffic, or the number of searches carried out by the public, do you know?).
THE RESULT: #8 FOR THE INDEX PAGE IN BOTH GOOGLE AND YAHOO.