Welcome to the Q&A Forum

http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/failblog

Thanks Ryan, you seem to always have good information. I researched it and I agree with your comments.

Jeremy, The reply I offered is based on the belief you know your competitor's names and want to perform research on specific companies. If you want to perform research on keywords then disregard my suggestion and go with Syed's.

Nice tip, thanks for sharing!

A quote I enjoy...."Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true". You earned the #1 spot which is great. It sounds like your plan is to wait for someone else to step up and take your spot and then react. I prefer to be proactive but the choice is yours.

Can you redirect those pages to some relevant category pages on the site?  The 301 may help in this situation.   Ideally you need to find out where the internal links are a eliminate them. The 4xx errors arent the worst, and those pages should get de-indexed eventually.  Also make sure the xml sitemap it updated with the proper urls and those old ones arent in there anymore.

Movement from position 1 to position 4 is not that unusual. I imagine this has caused a subastatntial drop in traffic as the CTR tends to drop sharply after position 3, but I wouldn't consider this a dramatic drop in rankings caused by problems with your backlinks. It is possible that some backlinks might be devalued by Google which has caused a small drop, More likely this is caused by a Panda update. Panda wasn't a one time update, and this Search Engine Watch article suggests an update around the time of your drop (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2080631/Google-Quietly-Launches-Panda-Update-Version-2.2). This probably means that Google sees your content as a little weaker than your competitors. Based on this, I don't think you need to make any major changes. Try to get some more good content up on your site. And I'm not sure how active you are in the social realm, but more social engagement (I suspect Google is a big fan of +1's) could help. I'm not sure if your on-page efforts are also limited to two keywords, but if so, I'd consider expanding that a bit. Diversification will make your traffic and revenue less susceptible to fluxuations like this. Moving into the social media will also give you another way to produce traffic that isn't reliant on SEO, while usually increasing the efforts of your SEO.

Thanks for hte clarification, Theo... Now , about this "first make sure these extra links will actually help rather than hurt you"... I'm not the sharpest tack just yet... how would you ensure that links like this would have a beneficial or detrimental effect? Is there a tool or method about which I am unaware? Thanks!

If keywords are reversed or switched, the "bonus" effect is vanished to most extent but its still better off than a domain with no keyword at all. Having keyword in a domain does give you an advantage in terms of ranking at least in the short run. Its worth noting that Google has been reducing the weight of exact match keywords and also 'keywords' usage in domains in general.

Good judgement prevails on these types of decision. Google does not offer a handbook that says "60% of the content must be original to the page". There isn't even any guideline offered. What I would share is most of a web page should be original content. You can provide a paragraph on your services, additional information on your coverage area which would be unique to the page, testimonials from customers in that area, andspecific examples of customers in that area such as "we provide services for Washington Elementary School located in Denver". User generated content such as comments are very helpful. Engage your customers and ask for feedback.

In this case, there is nothing that needs to be done.. you are good to go but in future if there are too many bad links and you suspect negative SEO in play, and you think its affecting you, you may want to create are report and send it to Google with detailed explanation. Hopefully, in future Google allows an option in webmaster tools where you could just go and 'flag' or 'disallow' any backlink that you think is bought by competition to get you down.

Such a broad question - What industry, what country, what is your budget, what is your website and most importantly - what is your product? There are a lot of good linkbuilders are around here, but if you have a crap website and a crap product, linkbuilding isnt really going to get you ROI It should cost anything from free to $1,000,000 a month (by which i mean - it depends, there are no quick, easy answers here) But I would quote 2 days work to investigate you industry, website etc before doing any linkbuilding - so thats minimum $1000 before I start - how does that fit your budget?