AnonyMouse - 10:15 am on May 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

There's a thread running called "A dropped site checklist", which many people have been praising. I quoted that site at the beginning of the post, as I wanted to dig deeper into what caveman was saying re:keyword density and backlinks.

My sites were sitting steady for months, rode out the Florida storm nicely, even good for me as many competitors did not. A few weeks ago, I changed my Title/H1 tag/keyword phrase from being a 3-word phrase to a 2-word phrase (which is in fact the main search phrase), and also added some site-wide links containing the 2-word phrase in the anchor text.

Wham! Goodbye to Top10 SERPS - I thought by more closely targetting the 2-word phrase, I would move up to 1-3 zone, from the 4-6 zone - not off the page alltogether!

Given that the site has a ton of solid backlinks and is a PR7, and nothing else changed, I think I can be pretty sure that the drop in the SERPS is related directly to my more aggressive targetting of the 2-word phrase. Note that I am not talking about outrageous overuse of keywords, simply the use of the keywrods in what used to be "accepted practice" (as per my first post in this thread).

My main question, which does not appear to have been fully addressed, is "is this accepted practice no longer valid" - i.e. is it now a no-no to put your keywords in title/H1/top page/throughout content/in links/in anchor text - because Google then thinks you are "algo aware" and penalises you?

The follow-on questions, in which case, is "what the hell do you do to target your keywords"?!?