Question for REAL SEO gurus...ranking issue

so whats your beef?

does the description read anything you wrote at all on the site somewhere or is it totally random?

It's probably something you wrote on your mainpage somewhere..

yes it is....but it's meaningless...not the one it was at first...should I try putting meta tags there

Meta tags are good for certain se's

the main things that I go for with google is
A) the title tag ( this is a biggie )
B) proper H1 text
C) keywordy alt tags

I have great title tag, proper h1 text, and keywordy alt tags and I was ranked very very well on google...however my site dissapeared from the main page, and I don't know why ?

bummp for you

Would have to know how often you are getting spidered by G, how competitive the keywords were that you were listed for, how long after you put it up you got listed, how many results there are for those keywords (and if thats changed drastically with this new update G has been trying out for the last week or so)
Also - keep in mind that G will use the description meta if you have it if they cant find a good description in the text of the page - but that can change everytime they spider (hence - needing to know how ofter you are spidered)

Hey Linkster,
thanks for your will to help, here's the necessary info:
I got spidered by G bot very often, maybe once a day or so.
The keywords are not that competitive, and I did obtain that position relative easy, but obviously couldn't managed to keep it. Again I don't know why.

It was about a week since G listed my site, at first at very good position, maybe 20ish or so, then later as I was doing daily updates the position moved on and the best SERP I got was 2nd place.
And the results of keywords search show about 1.5M competition sites.
I just added meta tags (desc,keywords,author,robots and copyright) and I am waiting to see what's gonna happen.

Also, Google found very nice desc. of my site and did use it when I was ranked 2nd or so there, but not now....it's some ridiculus text up there...

Please give me some clue.

Thx.

As far as the text they use for the snippet in the SERPS - its totally random but usually based on the most prominent text when they cache the page from that bot run - or what they match from your title, description and matching text in the page.
Other places they "figure out the importance" of text is from the linking text that links to your pages - if someone links to you that Google considers a good authority site - a lot of times they will use that to match whats on your page that day - thats why its so important to ensure your linking partners use the text you want

As far as your positions ranking - that can be affected by hundreds of things - from how ofter you update the pages, to how often you obtain links that Google spiders, to what other sites get updated for the same keywords etc etc It doesnt help right now witht them trying to fix a large database update they screwed up on two weeks ago that has kept the SERPS bouncing around everyday - so that part of it is kinda out of your hands

Great info in this thread :D