I have an interesting SEO point/question. Of all the sites I continually re-optimize to see what works, I have had the most interesting success with the company's site itself. I was trying to rank well for our "(small town's name) Web Design" or "(our small town's name) graphic design," etc. But then I decided to see how well we could rank for Florida web design and Florida graphic design.

Not too well, apparently, but surprisingly, when I wrote the title and site description geared toward the state search, it increased our Google rankings from about 6 to 2 for "(our small town name) web design." Do the search engines think to themselves, "Well, this site is located in this small town, which I can see in the content, but the title and site description are geared toward a larger search range, so this must be the best result for people in this small town"?

Essentially, I removed the small town keyword but then ranked better for it? This is an amazing syntactic advancement by the search engines because they are essentially (and usually correctly) thinking that if a small company is geared toward a larger search range, they may be the more qualified for the people lucky enough to be in that small town where that company is located. This would definitely indicate a more qualified SEO company. So even though the "Florida web design" rankings kind of stink, I was lucky to have tried it out.

Is this a fluke, or are the engines really this smart?