'widget" ranks 1st, 'widgets' ranks 125!

[goodbyedee]

Hello,

i was asked to optimize a year old website for keywords widget, widgets, blue widgets.

Before the optimization the site was nowhere to be found for those keywords. I optimized the title, meta, h1, h2, internal linking, created about 20 quality backlinks and after about 10 days i get:
blue widgets: 1st result
widgets: 7-12
widget: 80-130!

To day, 4 weeks after the first indexing i still rank on 12-13th page.
Has anyone faced the same problem before? Is there a logical explanation?

I can identify several problems with the site such as messy html code but in that case i suppose i wouldn't rank so good for the other keywords. Another issue is that on my listing for "blue widget" the description of the page on google results is the meta description, whereas for "widget" is the images alt text! the ranking page is the same (index.html)!

Any help would be very appreciated
thanks

[tedster]

Second part first - the snippet on the search results is not guaranteed to be the meta description. The snippet can vary with the query term, and there is a dedicated team at Google that works with the snippet generation. Their goal is getting clickthroughs for the results.

First part second - messy code (as long as there are no fatal errors) is not a ranking problem. So if you've done good on-page SEO it sounds like off-page factors are the issue in that big difference for the singular and plural versions.

Also remember that backlinks often grow in power as they age. Ten days is still a very young link.

[goodbyedee]

Hello tedster, thanks for the reply and the useful info.

apart from links, is there any other off-page factor i should consider?

[tedster]

Links and all that comes along with that - natural variations in anchor text and attracting a varied profile of sites that link, especially on-topic sites.