I like some aspects of your site, but I don't believe you earned a 2nd page ranking for the target phrase. There is seemingly a lot of competition for the keyword. Many developers from around the world might create a "web design greenville" page and attempt to compete with you. Here are some suggestions:

1. Your home page title and header presently target two keywords: "Website Design & Graphic Design Greenville, SC". If you perform a Google.com search for "Website Design & Graphic Design Greenville, SC" you are the #2 result. Your title and header represent the phrase for which you wish to rank.

If the most important phrase is "Web Design Greenville SC" then change your title and header to match. You will likely notice an immediately improvement in ranking once the change is made and crawled by Google.

2. You do not have a single backlink to your site using the phrase as anchor text. While you don't want all your backlinks to use the phrase, some of them definitely should.

3. Add your physical address and phone number to your page. Saying you are providing service for Greenville in your header is not enough. There are tons of companies in Los Angeles, NY, Miami, India and the rest of the world who are offering similar pages. You have the advantage of being authentic. Leverage that advantage by publishing your information on both your home page and the About page.

4. Use your target phrase at least once in your content. "I have been providing Web Design to Greenville residents for 5 years". There are many other ways to present the phrase but it needs to be there on your page. Preferably 2-3 times.

There are other changes you can made but these four changes alone have a great shot at bumping you to the first page of results. At the very least, you will dramatically improve your ranking.

You originally shared "Monday morning, I realized that my website, which had been showing up at the bottom of page 2 for a specific result, had now been demoted to the bottom of page 6 (roughly a 40 spot demotion). No other keyword searches were affected."

What is the URL of the specific web page which was affected? What is the keyword phrase which experienced the drop?

would this drop have been an automated deal?

In my opinion 99.99% of ranking drops are automated. Google has clearly indicated their desire is for their algorithms to perform all the work automatically. In cases where the Spam Team manually takes action, it only makes sense that they then work with other teams to automate the process of catching the issue.

Google makes approximately 500 changes to their algorithm each year, so it is possible for your rankings to change without making any changes to your site. Based on your situation, it is likely that one or more of the changes you made negatively impacted your site. There is not any way to know which change caused the drop. That is intentional. Google wants you to examine your site and fix any and all issues, not just one.

You mentioned adding several directory links. Links from quality directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ, BOTW, etc. would generally be considered "good' links. On the other hand, most free directory links are low quality and many are "bad" links. Ensure any links you build to your site are of a quality nature. For now, treat your page as if your rankings are valid and work to improve them. I know that is not what you want to hear at all, but it is the best way for you to get your old ranking back.

@TheBackBurner, the algorithm has thresholds. It's like a balloon. You can puff 30 times and it doesn't matter but then that last bit of air and poof.

Hi Marc. I would recommend contacting the help desk help@seomoz.org. The help desk personnel don't normally read the Q&A so your response should be much faster by e-mailing them. If you need even faster results you can give them a call as well.

You have seen image hyperlinks show up in a backlink report?

Yes, it is quite common. As an example, look at Google's link profile: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.google.com

The 4th/5th/6th links are from images.

Generally speaking, I would recommend that you do NOT copy these links from your competitor. The optimal way to use an analysis of a competitor's backlink profile is so you can copy the good links and leave the bad ones.

If you want to search your competitor's site for these links, you can try using the site: operator in Google, or perhaps the specific site's own search box.

There are forms of quality reciprocal links. They can be found on a "Resources" type of page on your site. If your site focuses on health topics you may link to the Mayo Clinic, the National Institute of Health, and other quality sites. The purpose of these links are to help your readers locate quality information. Some relevant sites may link to you as well and these links could be reciprocal which is fine.

If you have a "Resources" page where you provide links with perfect anchor text (i.e. "best real estate agent") to sites which are not relevant to yours, that is a rather obvious attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. The links you provide will offer little to no value, as well as the links you will receive. You need to give search engines a lot more credit. You are spending time and effort on what frankly amounts to bullsh*t SEO.

Investigate all your competitor's links. Look for their best links and investigate them. You want ideas, not to copy cat. The best you can do by copying your competitors is to eventually catch up to them. Provide better content, focus better keywords, be more current and relevant, be more authoritative and then you will gain links that a competitor can't copy...because the links you gain have to be earned.

Can you share more details about these reciprocal links? What is the purpose of placing them on your site?

The most important factor is to ensure only one URL is available for each page. You should not present the same page through both the /index.html and / URLs. Pick one.

My strong preference is to use the simple / URL as "index.html" does not offer any value to users nor search engines. It just makes the URL longer and more cluttered.

I'm sure Google knows that these are the same pages and does not consider them as duplicate ...

Not true. On your site you may choose to offer the same content via /index.html and /, but another site could choose to present completely different content on those pages. You are offering two unique URLs, your content is duplicated and that can cause multiple issues. Duplicate content is an issue and a division of your links is another issue.

The simple fix is to design your site from the beginning to only offer a / page and not a index.html page. If you have an existing site where this is an issue, use the 301 redirect to fix the problem.

Alt images can use alt text. The ALT parameter is designed to identify contents of an image to those without the ability to see images such as the visually impaired.

Anchor text is the term given to text which can be clicked on to take a user to a given URL.

Frankly, most "link building" services are pure crap. In my experience the overwhelming majority of them offer no value whatsoever. Many do more harm then good.

An image can be a link and pass link juice.

A bit.ly URL is a form of redirect. You will lose some link juice by using bit.ly, the same as you would with any redirect.