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Weird... well sorry to send you on a wild goose chase!

I like Svetoslav's theory - do you think it's possible?

Also a very good point...

I did get different rankings.  Rank tracker is showing me the static page ranking at #12 for your keyword and the blog page not in the top 50.

A manual test of Google search results with location set to Boulder, CO (not very accurate but at least I have no search history for that keyword) showed the same thing.  Just from looking at these pages those rankings seem more in line with where they should be...

Using the LDA Topics Tool in SEOMoz Labs reveals that a your keyword targeting is getting diluted by all the other stuff on the article pages... which reinforces Daniel's perceptions of your home page that too many things are going on at once.

I ran your article Chronic Disease Treatment through the LDA tool and found it only has a 51% relevance to the keyword "chronic disease treatment."  Your article is targeted well but it only makes up 334 words out of 641 total words that Googlebot can see on the page.  I would recommend making simple article pages that cut out all those menu bars and extra stuff and just includes your article plus a simple navigation bar.

Secondly, and more importantly, your articles do not seem to be garnering any links from outside sources.  I write for a niche B2B industry and I have the same problem - human feedback has said my articles are very informative but they don't inspire a link because they are so strictly informational.  Try using Google Insights to find trending topics related to your niche and then write a topical article that works in a reference to your website.

Do these pages have a 302 redirect on them? I tried to test the content of the pages through the LDA Topics Tool and I got an error saying that both of these pages are 302 redirected. If so that could be an issue...

Also, how are you gauging the rankings you refer to? Because I'm not getting the same rankings for these pages that you are.

What's the URLs of these pages?  There are way too many factors that play into rankings to give you good advice without seeing the pages themselves.

What is the URL of your site and your competitor's site?  There are many factors that play a role in rankings so you will have to dig deeper than just the number of backlinks you have and the DA and PA.

Post your URLs and the community will be able to give you some more specific advice.

I feel your pain.  I write content for a company that sells restaurant equipment - not exactly the most exciting topic out there.

But that doesn't mean you can't come up with some awesome articles that still reference your site.

For example, one linkbait that worked really well for me was surveying our customers about Groupon.  I had been reading in industry publications about how many restaurateurs didn't like Groupon - and earlier this year the company was a hot topic among the general public.

I published a press release titled Restaurateurs Think Yelp, Groupon Are Hurting Business citing my survey results and quoting a prominent restaurant marketing consultant.  The only reference to my company was that we had conducted the survey and I worked in some keyword anchor text back to our site.

I would use Google Insights to find some trending keywords related to popular news stories that cover the fashion industry.  Then build some content around those hot topics with some solid in-line anchor text links to your site.  Publish that on your blog, talk about it on social media, and see what happens.

Actually, when you type "comfortable shoes" into Insights you see some really interesting hot topics:

Wear Comfortable Shoes On Your Wedding Day
Why These Hunters Pack Comfortable Shoes
On Path To World Peace, Wear Comfortable Shoes

Some real gems there!

Yeah I've used the LDA tool in the past and found it helpful as a guide.  If I had to guess I would say LDA is giving their page a higher ranking because they have the line "Mfr. APW WYOTT" in every part listing on this page.

Meanwhile we have broken our parts up into subcategories to make it easier for actual users to find what they're looking for, and we therefore lose all of the relevant product content to the subcategories.

I think what I'll do is add content below the subcategories on these pages that is both useful to the visitor and keyword rich for the search engines.

Thanks Ryan.  The first four are known issues.  I just can't believe it's content that's beating me.  Is it that link with the pop-up paragraph or is there other content you're referring to?

Right, from a usability standpoint it's no good, but from a search engine standpoint, can Google tell the difference?

Why is the link to more content questionable?

Hi Ryan,

Even though "parts" in their root domain is only a partial match for these keywords that is making the difference???  Wow.  OK.  That explains why they often beat the manufacturer's website as well.

Try looking at the site again.  We experience regular outages like the one you just saw.  I'm sure that's not helping matters either.  It's a constant battle with IT to get that resolved.

A competitor is consistently beating my website on non-competitive, long tail keywords.  His DA is 32 compared to my 46.  His average PA is 23 to my 28.  His average On Page Optimization Grade is a C compared to my A.  His page speed score using YSlow is a 71 compared to my 78.

The only thing I can think of at this point is that he has a better URL structure.  We both have the keyword in the URL, but his structure goes like this (keyword: apw wyott parts):

www.competitor.com/apw-wyott/parts

While mine goes like this (I had nothing to do with this site's architecture; this is what I'm stuck with for the time being):

http://www.etundra.com/APW_Wyott_Parts-C347.html

It should be noted that the last word in these keywords is always the same - "parts."  These keywords are for parts by different manufacturers so they follow a consistent pattern: [manufacturer-name] followed by "parts."

Also, the "C347" on the end of my URL is the category number given to this particular category of products in our database.

Are his URLs beating me or should I continue to look for other factors?  If so, what other factors should I consider?

At some point in the past I read or was told that No Index, No Follow tags on category and tag pages were a good thing on a standard WordPress blog in order to prevent duplicate content issues.

Is this still true or was it ever true?

A WordPress plugin I like a lot is Old Post Promoter  It allows you to set old posts in certain categories to automatically re-post as new at specified intervals.  I put all of my evergreen content in a special category in addition to its proper category and then let OPP automatically re-post that content every couple days.  Since I have my Twitter and Facebook feeds hooked up to my RSS, that old content also gets automatically re-posted there as well.

A large ecommerce site I work on doesn't have a single ALT tag on any of the product images on category and subcategory pages.  I have come up with a way to add the H1 tag dynamically to the images on these category pages since I have already put in a lot of long hours optimizing the H1.

My concern is this: will the same keyword text on multiple images on the same page hurt me?  No category page has more than 10 images to be optimized.