What else can i do to go up.

Here's a bit of a background:

About 2 years ago, we redesigned our website, from a one page portfolio to a full XHTML website. A few weeks after that we debuted on page 2 of Google for "Toronto web design"

Each website we build for clients (or most of them) get us a backlink with the phrase "Toronto web design" and about 1 year ago, we purcahsed a domain that had a Dmoz inclusion, as well as paid for a Business and Yahoo Directory listing. We also wrote an article for Ezine Articles, and kept getting backlinks from client websites. Started a few social media websites, and got into position 5 on page 1 of Google. Since then, we haven't done anything, but have been getting more backlinks with more client work, and are jumping between position 3 and 5.

What can we do at this point to secure the first or second position. Is backlinking the only viable solution here? I would be interested in hearing what else we haven't done.

If you want to take a look at our website (overdue for a redesign) look for 3magine on Google.

I took a look at your portfolio... nice designs!

Yeah, just keep building backlinks.

The sitewide backlinks from your clients are a good method. I am doing SEO for a web design company and they weren't employing this method... once I had them go through and do it, they shot to the first page of Google where the other sites had great age and the lowest PR was 4 (aside from my clients PR 0 site, since it was brand new).

Also, I looked at the first 10 sites listed in your portfolio and found 3 of them that didn't have the "Toronto Web Design" backlink to your site. 2 of those had no backlink at all and 1 of them was "Wordpress Design" rather than "Toronto..."

Anyway, just keep building back links consistently and that will help your website to get to the #1 spot.

Some clients unfortunately don't allow backlinking. A couple have "Wordpress design" or "Wordpress Developmnet" because we didn't design them, just integrated Wordpress, and didn't want to step on the original designer's toes.

Someone here posted an interesting method of ranking blogs, I may give it a shot.

I'm also wondering if I do a re-design, and re-structure the content a bit, if our website will move up, as it hasn't been updated in about a year (everything except the portfolio section)

my take on this is for you to build high pr links and get them from different sources.it harder moving to number

You might want to bump up your keyword density a bit for your key phrase. Run your site through http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density or other free keyword density tools. When I did it for your site the phrase "Toronto web design" didn't even list.

I just looked at the output again and, while "Toronto" and "design" show up in the density list, the word "web" doesn't seem to register on the first page, according to this tool. You may want to try to integrate it more to see if that helps bump up the site.

You could also write up some tutorials and post them on sites like noupe.com, tutorialized.com, pslover.com and so on. You'll be killing two birds with one stone, namely extra backlinks and traffic but also setting yourself up as an expert.

You could then convert the same tuts into videos and podcasts and post them to appropriate sites.

Press releases will also help.

Just a few ideas but I'm sure there are others here with more experience that can chime in

The tutorial idea is something we'll seriously considering. As far as density goes, what's the optimal percentage I should be aiming at. Is it around 5%? More? Less?

Thanks.

I would say you should aim for around 2% and also work in LSI terms. You can find those using the Google Wonderwheel. LSI terms will help to increase relevancy and will make Google love you all the more...

This is a good job. but may be you should add online chat to your website and if you have done this relax.

online chat? what for?

So I read a bit more about keyword relevancy, and it seems it's pretty irrelevant. In addition to that, the first result for "Toronto Web Design" doesn't have that phrase when checking for density either. Seems pretty useless.

I'll stick with building backlinks, as it seems that has always worked well for us.