SEO Campaign Stalls Despite Cont'd Link Building - ever seen this?

[seoArt]

We started an seo campaign about 6 months ago.

We did all on-page optimization and started link building. The first 3 months saw significant increases in Google's rankings, then a small decrease.

Now, for the past 3 months, despite continued link building (all permanent, relevant one-way links), the rankings haven't budged.

Btw, the site has been around for years, and we examined "trust" factors pretty thouroughly to build on those as well. The site doesn't have any history of spam or black hat stuff.

We plan on holding steady, and continuing with the link building for this site. It's just been frustrating not to see any changes for so long.

Anyone ever seen this before?

[Onders]

Interesting thought spiral - but how would they match those ip's to links attained. Especially if a link builder is working on a variety of sites. Moreover, "link building" in itself is not something that google says is bad. On the contrary. So, I'm not sure what they would do with this list if they were compiling it.

[Jane_Doe]

Go for long tail. It is amazing what that can send you instead of focusing on a few main words.

Long tail searches also help to make you a bit more immune to algorithm updates and may help with smart pricing as well, if you use Adsense on your site(s).

[KevinC]

maybe a dumb question, but how do you target long tail searches?

[GF_Diablos]

I would make a landing page that targets the keyphrase.
Make the url the phrase, optimize titles and tags and make sure the content is actually useful content about the subject. Make sure to add it to your sitemaps and link it from a higher level page of your site then build some easy backlinks to it.

After that it's just a case of spending a little time doing SEO to increase ranking but long tailed should rise up faster.

[soxos]

Becareful not to overdo your exact phrase or you will get filtered out!

[KevinC]

I would make a landing page that targets the keyphrase.
Make the url the phrase, optimize titles and tags and make sure the content is actually useful content about the subject. Make sure to add it to your sitemaps and link it from a higher level page of your site then build some easy backlinks to it.

What described is how to optimize for 1 phrase or maybe a couple.

What would you do differently to target long tail searches?

My point is, what can you really do to optimize for long tail then what is commonly already done to optimize for a single phrase.