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No, varied anchor texts are the way to go, just make sure you have "used tires" in that order.
"used tires"
"keyword used tires"
"used tires keyword"
"keyword used tires keyword"
Also internal linking on your site should have proper anchor texts as well. I would concentrate on that first, and stay away from paid linking.
Brand new sites can sometimes take up to a year before Google trusts it enough for real rankings. But looking at your site, you basically took the same page of content and simply changed many (too many) instances of the location.
http://www.akinsseptic.com/alpharetta-septic-tank.html
http://www.akinsseptic.com/athens-septic-tank.html
I would rewrite each page as much as you can, including the generic "About Akins Plumber & Sewer" footer content, and maybe lower your keyword density so the pages don't look over optimized. Whoa easy there 
Less is better.
<meta name="keywords" content="septic tank, septic tank service, atlanta septic, atlanta septic tank, septic tanks, septic repair, septic tank repair, septic pumping, septic tank pumping, sewer line, sewer repair," />
alt="athens septic tank services, septic tank services athens, septic tank service athens, athens septic tank service, athens septic tank chemicals, chemicals septic tank athens, athens septic clog, athens septic clogs, clogs athens, sewer athens, sewers athens" title="septic services athens"
try this generic code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
Alternatively, try your code but lose the $ at the end of the first line like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.harrisonlighting.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://harrisonlighting.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]
I would take a look at how you're handling redirects. Any page that I remove the www from the URL takes you to the home page and not the www version of the page. That's a huge mistake. I would suggest fixing that right away.
http://harrisonlighting.co.uk/lumigos-princess-candlelight-philips.html
It is absolutely possible, Google is very smart.
a) Remove your external links to any penalized sites.
b) If you have links from penalized sites pointing to internal pages on your site, let those pages 404 and make new URLs for them. If you have bad links pointing to your homepage that is much more time consuming because you'll need to reach out to all the webmasters and have them remove any bad links pointing to your homepage.
c) Submit reconsideration requests in webmaster tools, explain exactly what happened and what steps you're taking to remedy the situation. Include something new that you did in each letter so they see the progress you are making. Good luck! Don't buy or sell links!
I don't have any recommendations based on your low budget, so hiring someone inhouse or working with elance should work for you. However, I strongly advise that you understand the tactics being used to obtain the links. If any of these people are using questionable methods or getting links on known spam sites, there may be some very negative consequences. The link builder should keep a spreadsheet of all links obtained. No money should be spent on links without your prior approval. Hope this helps.
I suggest you download the SEOMoz Toolbar and look at the link data. The competitor site far surpasses you in all the important factors like Moz Rank and Domain Authority. You can use Open Site Explorer and see exactly who's linking to your competitor and try to obtain these links as well.
I am not keen on using the canonical tag as an upfront solution. I would say to take the time out to highlight the slightly different features of each product and put each of them on a different page. If you find that difficult to do, then you can noindex the pages you that are duplicates and nofollow all internal links to these pages. Finally, I would highlight the difference of each product in the title of the product or Google Shopping will have a very hard differentiating these products.
If you created targeted landing pages then you are hoping to get those pages ranked for those search terms I assume.
Link to the internal targeted pages if you want them to rank for that keyword, unless you see the homepage already ranking for that term, if it is, then the homepage has a definite chance to rank even better. If nothing is yet ranking then go for the targeted internal landing page.
I had great success on a client side. In a nutshell, here is what I did:
1. Beefed up content on all pages across the site.
2. Zapped tens of thousands of worthless pages
3. Inserted the robots tag and set to "noindex, follow" on all of their pagination pages
Google probably uses Wikipedia pages as one of it's many indicators to verify a company's value. Wikipedia cross-links from top competitors will also provide Google hints that your company plays in the big leagues. Just take your time to set it up properly.
So you have four different sites, on different TLDs? Basically clones of each other? That's not the way to go - basically you can do two things:
a) Use only the .COM domain and Geo-Target the different language/country folders in Google Webmaster Tools. (my recommendation) or
b) Have your four different TLD's each with unique content. This is more work and more maintenance, and no longer the preferred strategy now that Google Webmaster Tools lets you assign different directories for your .com to different regions. Also, if the languages are different, such as French, German Etc Google knows already by virtue of the language which Google.xx engine to show those results in.
I would recommend taking a look at slash vs non slash pages and seeing how many non slash pages on your site are listed as 404'ing. Look at your 404'd pages in Google Webmaster Tools. If this happened to one URL chances it happened to many across your site and if so this is a big issue but can be resolved very easily by appending the slash to the end of all URLs.
Some code might have broken or been improperly or accidentally changed by a webmaster, because if the slash URL version was originally there then that used to be the standard and something technical caused it to go away. This could have broken if you changed from Microsoft to Linux or vice-versa - the .htaccess file or modrewrite would stop working if that was the case.
Since link building is a very time consuming process, you would be better concentrating on getting people to link directly to you.
If you get a link to a site that links to you, the PR from that original site is distributed equally among all the links on that page and you only get a very small fraction of that PR being passed to your site, so it's really not worth it.
That being said, links for the sole purpose traffic are completely legit, while links intended to manipulate search results are are not recommended at all.
Check your analytics, if your traffic hasn't dropped significantly then it's the tool. Also, as mentioned manually check your rankings.
Also do a google trademark search for your domain to see if the site is not penalized itself. Just go to google.com and type in the name of your domain with everything stripped away for example if your site is:
http://www.mygreatsite.com then go to goole and type in "mygreatsite"
If you're not in the top results your site may have a trademark suppression. Or you can use an online Google penalty tool checker but no guarantee that that tool isn't broken as well
The Walrus is correct.
301 is more for obsolete pages that you want to point to new pages so you can retain PR (although 301's still lose a little bit of PR) and also used to avoid any guests from getting a 404 error from bookmarked or links pointing to that page.
I would also advise you not to link from the high quality site into the low quality site. Outbound links to spammy sites may cause guilt by association. Also, do not overlink from the low quality to the quality site as Google may flag that as well. Do not be concerned about the AdWords penalty. I know sites that got bounced from AdWords and nothing ever happened to their rankings.
Just to add a little bit to Manischa Mittal's response. I would recommend you spend a couple hundred dollars with SEM and test out several ad variants and see which ad gets the highest CTR. Take the creative winner(s) and use it to build your meta description tag.
Just to add a little bit to Manischa Mittal's response. I would recommend you spend a couple hundred dollars with SEM and test out several ad variants and see which ad gets the highest CTR. Take the creative winner(s) and use it to build your meta description tag.
In my experience, the sequence of the H tags didn't matter at all, but if the H1 tag doesn't deserve to be on top of the other heading tags, I would suspect something may be wrong with your page layout. I don't recommend more than one H1 tag.per page. The H2, H3 and H4 tags are meant for sub headers. If you don't use the header tags as intended, your pages may be flagged as spam, so use cautiously. I have seen so many webmasters unwittingly abusing these tags, like by putting their brand name in a H1 tag on every single page.