So here's a puzzle for all you SEO gurus out there.

I recently launched my own site. I had target keywords which were ranking very well for about 1 month, within the top five and even appearing in first place.

In an attempt to maintain good positioning, I followed guidelines by

• adding robots.txt,
• an xml sitemap
• redirecting non-www to www
• redirecting index.php to root domain
• adding htaccess 301 redirect for old pages
• I added rich snippets
• created a google+ account, verified my picture to appear,
• I went through each of the webmaster issues with duplicate titles and meta descriptions and improved header tag document outlines
• i even created a few more blog posts to keep the content freshing and moving.

So now my website appears on page 2 with my target keywords - and all because I followed the guidelines.

What is happening? I see competitors with stagnant content superglued to position 1.