Penguin Effect - from #1 to #5 - afraid to touch website

[bigcat1967]

Hey guys:

I have a friend who lost 2/3 of his traffic from slipping from #1 to #5 for the keyword phrase "credit card processing by phone". However, we were looking at his title tag - and it reads:

Small Business Merchant Account - Accept Credit Cards by Phone

We thought that maybe we should change it to look like this:

Accept Credit Cards by Phone - Small Business Merchant Account

The former - the keyword phrase we're going after gets cut off (within the title tag) and we don't think the bots are seeing the whole title - if we change it, then maybe we're thinking that we'll regain our #1 position again, or at least move up within the top three. However, with Google being so unpredictable - we are afraid to touch anything and might just go strictly by expanding his website with putting new articles on the site and also doing some social networking.

Question: Should we change the title tag to the suggested or are we taking a big risk in doing so? This is his main income - so anything we touch on the index page could lower it. Let me hear from you guys - what do you think?

btw - his site is http://accept-by-phone dot com

 

[djbaxter]

FYI, that site is #6 on Bing for that exact search phrase, and #9 if I remove the quote marks, mostly because some Canadian sites come in for the second search...

But getting back to your question, I would definitely make the change to the title tag you are considering. You should ALWAYS have your major search terms in the title tag in decreasing importance left to right.

Additionally, that search term needs to also be in the page content and you have missed some important opportunities there:

Accept-By-Phone ™ has made it easy and affordable for small businesses, professionals, seasonal merchants & tradespeople to accept major credit cards.

With a monthly fee of only $5.00, now all professionals and small business owners can afford to accept credit cards

Change to:

Accept-By-Phone ™ has made it easy and affordable for small businesses, professionals, seasonal merchants & tradespeople to accept major credit cards by phone.

With a monthly fee of only $5.00, now all professionals and small business owners can afford to accept credit cards by telephone.

Although this won't affect ranking, it may affect CTR. Do the same thing with the meta description tag:

Change

<meta name="description" content="Designed specifically for small businesses and professionals that need a mobile merchant account, Accept by Phone is simply the most effective and affordable merchant service available. And it's completely mobile -- see for yourself.">

to

<meta name="description" content="Accept credit cards by phone: Designed specifically for small businesses and professionals that need a mobile merchant account, Accept by Phone is simply the most effective and affordable merchant service available. And it's completely mobile -- see for yourself.">

Delete this:

<meta name="REVISIT-AFTER" content="14 days">

I would also recommend moving your CSS files and javascript files to separate files and including them to improve page load speeds.

And also add more text content describing the service on the home page, rather than bullet points and images.