Help ! Site dropped from top 3 ranking

[gordoncontagious]

My site has enjoyed a top 3 ranking in Google for almost a year now after much SEO work, but has completely dropped of the listing for my main keyword, has my site been penalised for something.

Site: http://www.contagiousclubwear.com

Keyword: Clubwear

Any help greatly appreciated as this is our main source of leads and our most busiest time is almost upon us,

Gordon

[weslinda]

Well, there are a few things that I would point out as a negative at the moment.

1. Homepage is basically void of information, you have to go to a second page to get to any information.
2. Your main page has hidden text inside the page, this is a sure fire search killer. The text I found was "clubwear,ravewear,clubbing outfits,sexy clubwear, fluffy legwarmers,what to wear clubbing, club wear" inside of the white main section of your site, not sure if there is other text hidden in other areas, but this is a major issue with the search engines.
3. You have a unique "partners" section that Google has indexed and seems way off topic of your site.
4. Upon further inspection, your main homepage also has hidden text "Clubbing clobber in a range of styles and fabrics that will get you noticed and make you stand out from the crowd every time you go out. We provide the very best in designer clubwear, club outfits, club clothes, ravewear, fluffy legwarmers, fluffy boot covers and cuffs and accessories from hotpants and mini skirts to fluffy bra-tops and fluffies from our secure online club wear store. Get your Club on with Contagious Clubwear". Very, very bad when it comes to search engines.
5. There are pages and links that lead a visitor to different or non-existant pages within the site such as index.htm off your main directory which loads to a white page.

Lots of work to get yourself back I would say. I would recommend a rethink of site navigation and layout, and also work on getting more links from other sources regarding your site. If you'd like to discuss this in more depth, please feel free to PM me.

[shellyL]

I agree with Weslinda. Your homepage needs some content. Personally i always believe old fashioned, non-flash sites with lots of content get much better ranking on the search engines.

[weslinda]

Flash isn't your main culprit. It can be bad, but it isn't a site killer, you do have to learn how to set your site up effectively and give various ways to reach content on your site.

Cleaning up your site, and giving solid access to visitors and search engines of your content will help drastically.

[incrediblehelp]

Good points from weslinda as always. Couple of points:

1. You don't have any internal navigation that is crawlable. You need to build out that navigation with CSS or regular text links.

2. Work as hard as you can in getting IBL's to sub-pages like:

http://www.contagiousclubwear.com/st...y.aspx?catid=2 including the text "hot pants" in the link to the page if that is what you want to rank for.

3. Do you have titles matching the content of the page or even unique total tags on every page?? Doesn't seem so. Big issue there.

4. I feel like shooting myself in the face after listening to the club beats after about 10 seconds.

I would recommend hiring a SEM and SEO professional to help you.

[weslinda]

Yup, a site map would be helpful, and using a XML sitemap would be good as well. That coupled with an improved site nav would help tremendously.