Time kills effort

That was the result of the achievement by hard work of many weeks.

That one line gives us a clue.

The only thing I can think of to get back to the top is more backlinks, more social media and more text content unless you have anything else to suggest.

Backlinks are not possible of doing in the right way.
You would either need to exchange links with some not related websites or pay for getting links on not known sites.

More social media is doable but you need to be quite creative and have a lot of spare time. I would say it is a full time job and you need news and stuff to share and talk about on a regular basis almost every day.

More text is a tricky one.
There are two questions: Where to place the articles and how often do you need to add one? If you add one every week you will end up in hundreds of them so where do you keep them?

Obviously you are targetting your home page.
You cannot keep adding articles on to your homepage can you?
This would ruin the design of your webpage and would make it look messy.
How about creating a new website, or may be a blog where your would post articles one after another, eventually having a lot of them and having the right key words for your website with embedded links to it?
Will that work and help your website?

Another option is to keep submitting articles to 3rd party directories.
But I dont like this option because you are simply giving your work away which can be used somewhere else in the end and you could even get a blame for copying it.

How best to proceed?

Hi Lina

I think a quick look at your linking profile holds the answer. In a nut shell, it's anchor text.

What worked really well before, keyword rich anchor text is now frowned on. Mr Google wants everyone to have a completely natural linking structure, where people link because they have found a genuinely useful resource. In that situation, someone coming across your site is unlikely to use an anchor text of "Hairdressers Milton Keynes". More likely it will be your URL, or business name.

It's frustrating, but Google has been saying for a long time now, keep your linking structure natural, it's only recently that they have really enforced it with these Penguin updates.

From 9,602 links, it looks like a lot were site wide links (eg people have it in the footer), and this then breaks down to 240 different domains.

Of these, 80% have keyword anchor text:
Hairdressers Milton Keynes
Wedding Hairdressers Milton Keynes
Hairdressers MK
Hair Stylist etc.

You're not alone, and most of us played the keyword anchor text game at some point, but you had to vary it, to make it appear natural.

As with others, I'm slow time removing a lot of low quality or dodgy links with things like "free advertising", after historical forays into SEO outsourcing which, to be fair worked a couple of years ago (we were P1 for Free Advertising and now about page 20 ), but those days are well and truly over.

Sit down, review your strategy, and analysis everything you used to do. Things in the SEO world have changed dramatically, and are set to change even more so over the next 12 months...

Hi Steve

So some anchor text is still OK ... Any advice please (from anybody!) on the proportions of anchor text to non-anchor text we should now be aiming for?

Nice to hear from you again, Lina ...

Hiya Linda.

I only SEO our sites, so it's only my opinion and professional SEO peeps may very well disagree, but the key thing is a Natural linking profile.

We have lots of anchor text that says My Local Services, this is fine as it's our site name. If someone links to your site, what would they link as (assuming a normal text link). It's unlikely to be keyword rich or salesy. Most of us have plenty of historical keyword anchor text, it's just about balance.

Looking at yours it doesn't seem to bad, your most common ones are careers partnership uk and careerspartnershipuk

You can check it yourself from tools such as Open Site Explorer