Top 10 keywords is still going strong but the rest just got smashed!

[Drillo]

Hi SEOMOZ and it's USERs,

Been trying to find my answer online but now after three weeks of reading blogposts I'm going to try this.

My website was ranking really good on 10 important keywords but not so good on the long tail, between 11 - 50 on maybe 30 different other, not so important keywords.
So I began doing some work (I'm a newbie) but this is what I did:
1. Changed top navigation structure to get 4 other pages (w/ keywords as links) in it. (used a dropdown)
2. Wrote plenty of text that was a good fit for the page. (The text is OK and not to spammy looking.)
3. Added three links from high quality sites with keywords as links to these pages. I added them from my own site that is on the same server, same IP. I know, not looking so good.
4. Changed URL structure on a couple of pages to get a keyword in it. (did a correct 301)
5. Changed to better Titles and headings on the page. Keywords in them both but not the same.

The result:
1. My 10 most important keywords I began ranking even better. I rank no. 1 on 9 out of 10.
2. Almost all the other pages went from ranking ~ 15 - 50 to not > 50.

It has now been 4 weeks since I did most of the changes and 3 weeks since all the pages was hit > 50.

So now I'm thinking about what to do?
1. Should I clean up my text, titles so they don't look to over optimized?
2. Should I remove my links from my own pages? (my link profile in general is actually pretty good.)
3. or should I just wait? Because changing more will just indicate to Google that somehing fishy is going on ?

In the beginning I hoped that Google killed my rankings just because of the big changes. But now after 3 weeks I'm more sceptical and thinks I've been hit by a over-optimizing filter.

According to webmaster tools I've not been hit by a manually penalty.

Please, help me. I would really appreciate all ideas from people here with more experience.

[Chris.Menke]

So it sounds to me that you really just need to focus on the SEO basics, don't do things that you know you're not supposed to do just to try to speed things up (like building a bad link profile) and focus on understanding who your audience is so you can create content that's better than "not too spammy".  Remember, doing SEO stuff without a high regard to its correctness or its adherence to Google's webmaster guidelines gets a lot of newbies in trouble.

[Drillo]

ok. Thanks for clarifying.

Of my top 10 important keywords that I rank no. 1, 7 of them are to my home page and 3 to other pages on my site.

[Chris.Menke]

By the second point, I meant: is it only your home page that ranks well (for all of those 10 high-ranking terms), or are any of your internal pages also ranking well?

[Drillo]

Hi Chris, 
Thanks for taking the time to get back.

• The pages were a couple of years old. But because of no On-page optimization they weren't ranking as good as I wanted them too. 
  If I look at my competitors, the top 10 pages are much worse in quality then mine. (Ok, I'm not unbiased )

• Not sure if I understand this question. The important keywords that I rank really on are mostly ranking my homepage/front-page. But there are a few sub-pages that are ranking well on a couple of important keywords too.

• According to SEOMOZ Keyword difficulty tool they are all about the same in difficulty. Between 30 - 40 %.

[Chris.Menke]

Eskil,

A couple of things I didn't get from your question that could help in providing an answer:

• How old were the pages that were not ranking as high as you think they should when you made the changes you described in your question?
• Are the keywords that are ranking well on pages besides the homepage?
• How competitive are the terms you are ranking well for and how competitive are the ones you are not ranking well for?