oneeyedpauly

For the last three years or so my site (http://www.retroedgewebdesign.co.uk) has ranked around position 2 or 3 for the search term "web design plymouth". To be honest, this was with little SEO work, my site has been around while and I guess back links from the sites I've built over the years, a few directories and reasonable content has been enough to retain that position.
 
The site recently dropped to around position 5 as a couple of other sites made it in above me. No problem I think, I can handle position 5 as long as I don't drop any further. Over the last month or so I've dropped to the point I'm now on page 2.
 
Whilst at position 5 I started making some changes to the site and I'm guessing it's one of these if not the others that are causing the problems:
 
1 - I added links with anchor text "Web Design Plymouth", "Web Design Exeter" etc linking back to the home page in the footer.
2 - The large statement with anchor links in the footer.
3 - Pages I've created http://www.retroedgewebdesign.co.uk/web-design-plymouth http://www.retroedgewebdesign.co.uk/web-design-exeter, http://www.retroedgewebdesign.co.uk/web-design-newton-abbot with similar (although not identical) content.
4 - Anchor links added to client sites saying "Website Design Plymouth"
 
I'm no SEO expert (obviously from the mess I've made of my site). I'm a bit confused as to what the benefits of anchor text are as they currently seem to be doing me no favours. Either that or there is something completely unrelated that I'm not aware of?
 
Any help or advice would be EXTREMELY gratefully received?

Might be worth knocking up your own base responsive skeleton for use on other projects. That's pretty much what i've done.
Then you can work from scratch and know the theme inside out which will make further development far quicker.

I've used this one on a couple of sites and it works quite well:
http://wpcal.firetree.net
 
Check out http://www.dcompanydevonacf.org to see if it does what you need it to. You have the sidebar widget and then the Events are added through Posts into their own category. You can then use that category to display all the Events on it's own Events page.

Firstly you need to split your blog into categories, i.e. Blog and News. Every time you add a post for the blog page you tick the blog category, the news page the news category.
 
You then need to set up a new template for the news category, basically save the index.php file with this in the header:
 
<?php
/*
Template Name: News
*/
get_header(); ?>
 
You will then be able to select it as a template on the News page.
 
On the news template page you then need to add...
 
<?php if(have_posts()) : ?>
<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts("category_name=news&paged=$paged"); ?>
<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
 
...where news is the name of your category.
 
You will need to do a similar set up for the blog page otherwise all your posts will display on the blog page. The above coding simply filters posts into categories.
 
Hope that helps.

Firstly you need to split your blog into categories, i.e. Blog and News. Every time you add a post for the blog page you tick the blog category, the news page the news category.
 
You then need to set up a new template for the news category, basically save the index.php file with this in the header:
 
<?php
/*
Template Name: News
*/
get_header(); ?>
 
You will then be able to select it as a template on the News page.
 
On the news template page you then need to add...
 
<?php if(have_posts()) : ?>
<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts("category_name=news&paged=$paged"); ?>
<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
 
...where news is the name of your category.
 
You will need to do a similar set up for the blog page otherwise all your posts will display on the blog page. The above coding simply filters posts into categories.
 
Hope that helps.

Think you are after this...
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/thumbnail-for-excerpts/
 
Adds a thumbnail from post and allows you to set excerpt limit.

Oh how I love the Apple/Microsoft debate, it reminds me of when I was at school and everyone argued over which was better the sega megadrive or super nintendo... does it really matter which company is more evil Microsoft or Apple, they are companies after all and really only after one thing, your hard earned cash. As far as I'm concerned as long as both companies exsist at least they will be competing with each other which can only be good for the consumer.

I don't know PHP, I've used Dreamweaver before but used it to my advantage as I'm not clued up with how to make a website just by using codes.
 
The advice I need really is what do I need to learn basically? Then I will go and try my best to go and learn it.

Smell my cheese!

Hooray for Wordpress, I am also a recent convert.
 
I like the site, it's clean and gets your info across well. I like the bird, I think the logo would be boring without it. Possibly a bit too much space above the logo and I'm not keen on the big yellow/orange box. It's certainly eye catching, but think you could do a bit more with it. Other than that, it's pretty cool, well done.
 
With regards to plug ins, thumbnails for excerpts is pretty good, just makes your homepage posts a little more interesting.