What happened to my Google SERPs?

Wow, just last month i was ecstatic because i made it to page 2 of google for ' las vegas foreclosures '.......and now i'm nowhere to be found!.....think i dropped to page 9 or something. But still, what happened? Maybe i should stop doing my own seo and just hire a SEO specialist huh? I don't think i'm the only one though cause i have read about a lot of websites going through the same ordeal the last few weeks.
On the other hand, i have crept up to like page 5 of Bing for a few keywords..... not bad:)

finally on top of Google!

Today, sep 13 '09, was a great day! I finally got my website to rank on the top 20 of google for the keywords: las vegas foreclosures ; foreclosures las vegas. I've been seo'ing my own website and i've never gotten past page 5, but today was a different story - i was on page 2!!!!!!
Does this mean more leads/ clients for me?....... i hope so:)
Actually i'm doing ok with my Las Vegas real estate business in the meanwhile with a few clients. But to accomplish this without any formal seo/serp or html training means a lot to me. hmmn........maybe i can be a realtor / seo guy? (more like seo dummy - but learning)

Links to my website :)

DiscountLasVegasHomes.com
discountlasvegashomes.com/mortgageinfo.html
discountlasvegashomes.com/realestatenewslinks.html

Google Adsense

Does anyone make any money from google Adsense? Yesterday I added google adsense to my website: http://DiscountLasVegasHomes.com to hopefully make a little bit of extra change:) We'll see how it works, guess you probably need a lot of traffic going to your site first.
Will having adsense help your site as in more traffic? or do the ads count as possible backlinks?

SEO novice

I can't tell from my google account if all my pages have been indexed. My sitemap is html format and not xml. When i check outbound links from my website: http://discountlasvegashomes.com it only shows outbound links from the home page but not from the other pages?

las vegas real estate

Hi. Let's see if this works. Any bloggers out there interested in buying real estate in las vegas? If so.... pls check out http://www.discountlasvegashomes.com
thank you,