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PR as you are talking about is only updated every now and again, http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/google-pr-update/

Have you don't any link building recently or in the past?

According to that link it has not been updated since 2013/2/4

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/google-pr-update/

I differ in thinking here on one point.

I believe that links pointing to the same page have the same decay as any other link. That page rank flows out of them just the same, obviously it goes to the same page but some of it is lost every time.

What I do and looks much better is use javascript to scroll to that spot,

$('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: $("#mytarget").offset().top - 70 }, 'slow');

This will scroll to your anchor, the offset lets you position things nice.Even if I am wrong, the scrolling animation looks and feels much better

Maybe.

I have the #1 position for a corner of the market, but I could not get a second page on the front page, seeing I had #1 I hade a second site and then had 1# and #2,soi made another, I now have 3 on first page, once you have #1, this seems they way to go.

no its not, you do lose a little from 301 redirect but very little

As long as you have different TLD's you can get away with duplicate content. this is true for TLD's such as .co.uk and .com.au but not sure about .com. and .us as they may both be seen as US

I once was temped to get cheap links, and yes it worked for a time. i have about 200 links each for about 4 sites, over a few months they all dispapeared.

I did notice that your site is accessable via www and non www.

If you fix that with a 301 you may get the boost you need.

Goolge resently released tga for doing this http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

I find local or niche directories, just the free ones if they are local or relevant. If they are nich then by nature no everyone is included.
Matt Cutts has stated that they still give weight to directoreis that dont accept eveyone, he has also stated that local directoreis are a good idea, when mixed with a few quality links.

Paid directoreis are ok, if the fee is justifyed, meaning the review your submission and dont accept all commers.

I did a scan on your site, and you have quite a few technical issues. You are leaking LJ unnecessarily
You have a lot of unnecessary 301 redirects, I would direct the links directly to the correct page, each redirect leaks LJ
You also have a lot of irrelevant link text, again leaking LJ in the way of relevance
You also have a lot of pages blocked by noindex.
Quite a few broken links
Canonical issues, again wasting juice
Also you code is very messy, heaps of css and script, and huge blocks of JSon objects. You should get them into css and js files and off the page

This does not answer why your competitor ranks , but you could be doing a lot better yourself.

I think of it like this, if a fisherman has holes in his fishing net, he has to do a lot more fishing that a man who does not, if you have a lot of violations in your site, you need a lot more links

I see a lot of this
The link to "http://www.ultimatesandbagtraining.com/?p=178" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://www.ultimatesandbagtraining.com/sandbag-fitness/getting-strong-without-barbells/".

Why not link directly to http://www.ultimatesandbagtraining.com/sandbag-fitness/getting-strong-without-barbells/ and save the link juice.

How is your site made, with a cms? cms sites are always behind the 8ball technicaly.
You competitor has a lot less technical issues even taking into account his site is smaller

I would keep away from article posting sites, your article will be put deep in the down in the linking structure, most of these sites will have more than 100 links on a page almost all pointing back to their own site so you onley get less than 1% of the little link juice the page has. There is something to say about relevancy, but I don’t think the effort is worth it.
Matt Cutts is pretty negative about them, he his more up beat about directory posting in relevant quality directories.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY
You are better of writing a blog, or posting the articles on your own site and getting someone to link to them.
I am not much of a link builder, I build sites for small business and I rely on getting my sites technically clean from violations, then listing in local and niche directories, joining niche forums where you get a link on your profile page. OK not the prettiest links, but they are gettable and work ok.

Quite often depending on how competitive the keywords that is enough to get you ranking. Works well for Google Places
For quality links, I use the business owner, I tell him he has the best chance of getting quality links from Business to Business contacts.

If I am still not there, I follow Matt Cutts advice, and add compelling content and hope it gets links. The content I have had the most success with has been charts, facts and figures (infoGraphics). This does work well over a long time.
Mate, link-building is really hard.

I have the same thoughts, there may be some businesses that benifit more then others from social but for a smash repairs for example, i cant really see Socila being of much use. I think you are better putting your efforts in to plain old SEO unless you have content that is likly to go viral.

If you have a funny ring tone for a mobile phone then social may get you a load of sales. If you are offereing a free quote on smash repairs for the Pine Springs area, then i think you are better offf putting you efforts into Local search.

I should also confess i know little abourt social, maybe others can show me to be wrong.

alt text is fine. but yes you want your keywords in there if you can.

The best link you can get is a contextal link with keywords. meaning a link in the main body of text, not in the footer of sidebar, but in the content itself.

The Microsoft IIS SEO Tool Kit
I am yet to find a site that does not have a pile of errors, I get all my sites free from violations, this gives me a head start (how big that head start is is debatable)

If your technical side is not perfect all your SEM is discounted. Its like fishing with holes in your net.

I'm with Istvan, dont do it

as with seeing sites do well with lots of spammy links, it is often the case that they also have a few really good links, and it is that few good links that is getting them their rankings. if they are being sucessfull with only spammy links, they have teh chance of getting found out at anty moment. Most sites like this dont last.

Stick with it, success is not garenteed, but usually good content with time will win.

I did a little bit of checking on your site and found numerous violations. The most numerious was html errors. I stoped at 15,000 of them. They are mainly unclosed or unopend html tags. SE's can not tell what is visiable content and what is not, it is hard for them to trust what they see.

most of your pages have over 1000 lines of code, this is a high noise rate to content, just random check of mine show 100 to 400 lines almost all is content. i would move scripts to external files.

You also have a lot of redirects like

"http://www.frontlinemobility.com/store/pg/15-Why-Frontline.aspx" has resulted in HTTP redirection to
"http://www.frontlinemobility.com/store/pg/15-Why-Frontline.html".

"http://www.frontlinemobility.com/store/c/31-Wheelchairs.aspx" has resulted in HTTP redirection to
"http://www.frontlinemobility.com/Online-Wheelchair-Store.html".

why not link directly to the final destination? Redirects leak link juice

You have many images without alt tags, a good chance to get some keywords in

Also non relevant link text like "more", you should use keywords in link text tio make the pages rank for that term

I assume you are using a off the shelf cms, ecommerce package, and these things may be hard to fix, but SE' like clean code free from violations

Egol and Ryan both give good advice, they useually dont do any harm, but as Ryan said they can look out of place.

One thing you can do if the owner does not want to get rid of them, is to add a load of internal links on the page, that way you will be giving away less, most of the link juice will be recycled. Also dont link to the links page from your home page, link to it from a weaker page, that way it wont have much to give away anyhow.

One other point, if you had external links pointing to the missing links, you should 301 then to a relevant page

No i dont think it will, as long as the text is natural, then i can see you having that term in your blogs so many times that it will look un-natrual. I really would not worry.

this is a good thing to do, of cause even better if you can get external links to point to you with the link text.

Only the first link in a page will help, so if it is in twice only link the first instance.