My WordPress Blog rankings - the good, the bad and the weird

Recently I've been trying to see how easily (or not) I can get my WordPress blog ranked in search engines. First I would do some keyword research, then write the blog and then wait... and check google... and then wait some more! Now I've waited too long and need to seek answers. There are good things and bad things and then there are my blogs! I cannot seem to place the facts. Here are two examples at least.

Example #1:

In the middle of April (this year) I wrote a blog called Release your Potential. I can now go through countless Google pages in search of it but I still haven't found it ranked, anywhere! I have some article backlinks and some links to it on other blog posts but still not on page one.

I can fully understand this because the competition on the 'release your potential' keyword is over 1 000 000. So I tried something else - I search for the same keyword but put a very common (to my niche/website) word after it. So now the search reads 'release your potential motivation' and the result... Google #1! Impressive, I thought! The same goes for searching 'motivation to release your potential' - Google #1. So in some ways I can see how easy it is to get my blogs ranked but check this out now:

- 'motivation to release your potential' has only 8 competing pages
- 'release your potential motivation' has almost 3 000 000 competing pages!

So as you can imaging, this confuses me to the point where it simply doesn't make sense - I cannot build a 'formula for blog success' on this!

Example #2:

About a week ago, I wrote another blog called Who Should you Compete With. 7 hours after posting the blog, I found my blog on page 11 of Google, with no backlinks or anything (unless I was sleep-backlinking!).

17 hours after posting, I found it moved up to page 10! This seemed to be the good news, right? Well, the bad news is that now I cannot find it anywhere - I lost the will to peruse Google at page 41!

So what I did then was to check the competition again, after doing my initial keyword research. After all, I may have missed something! What I found, when I clicked on 'Competition', was that there were only 4 results, with my blog at number one:

I cannot seem to understand how these blog rankings work. I guess I'd need to study the ranking algorithms in order to conclusively know! Although, looking at the above, wouldn't anyone think that there is something else going on in the background?

In the first example, why does it seem that the page has been indexed and ranked but then disappears all of a sudden, due to a Panda 2 release or something similar! In the second example, why is it not being ranked at all - unless it's on page 42! Surely that cant be right!

ANY feedback is welcome - your thoughts, your criticism, your insight and your knowledge of course!
Thanks for reading - to your Blog success!