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Thanks so much for the insight guys! This is super helpful, and definitely gives me a solid strategy going forward.

Quick question:

When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword.

My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank.

However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall.

Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines.

Would love any insight on this!

Guys, thank you so much for all of this insight! Everything you mentioned definitely makes sense. I'll be diving in and taking action based on all of this as soon as possible, and will report back if I have any follow up questions, and also to keep you posted on the progress.

Thanks for such thoughtful responses!

Hi guys,

I'm just off to a start with trying to work out some SEO, and so far I seem to be making things worse! Would love to get your insight.

I've had a page for quite some time. From what I've learned so far, it seems that the page has had some good things going for it already.

Just to get things rolling, my goal was to optimize my site for just one keyword phrase. The phrase included a location "Brooklyn", so I jumped into things and got a Moz local account. Then I went through the page and made some tweaks that brought my keywords into more of the H1 tags, URLs etc. Finally, I went into Google Webmaster tools and looked through some of the options and submitted an XML sitemap.

When I started things off, I could regularly find my site on page 8 Google when searching for this phrase. Now when I search Google, I can't find it on the first 20 pages.

I understand that it can take months for optimization to kick in, and I certainly wasn't looking for overnight results. However, seeing that my ranking has gone down is certainly frustrating.

My theories on why this may have happened are that either 1) Something in my changes was detected as being "spammy" by Google, and they've penalized me for this, or 2) Maybe there's some means by which these changes are being "processed" by the search engine, and I just need to have more patience.

I'd love to hear if it looks like I've done something wrong, or if it's really just more a matter of patience.

The site that I'm working on is www.jacobarthur.com, and the keywords set is "brooklyn wedding photographer"

Thanks for any insight!