Need advice to improve SERPS on site for specific keyword

My site in question is below in my sig. It ranks very well in both Google and Yahoo for all my relevant key words, except for "des moines real estate" which in Google is usually ranked 11-15th for the last few months despite some recent link building using that phrase.

Any advice on how to improve ranking for such a specific keyword? I'd rather not do anything to jeapordize my other great serps.

 

To avoid compromising your other keywords, why not make a new page for this keyword and optimise the page specially for it. Then you can get some links pointing to it with that keyword. Should be quite easy on a four word string keyword like that.

 

well with the 12th place ranking in Google for that keyword, I was hoping it wouldn't be too much more work to improve using the current page. Plus I'd rather not have redundant pages for my visitors.

 

Have some articles written, and use the keyword you are targeting for anchor text in the article.

 

I would also add another link to your signature. "Des Moines Real Estate"

 

you have a pr of 4. That is pretty good. Like I said add anchor text to all the forums you are on.

 

As said, create a new page with those keywords on it. Also, save it as desmoinesrealestate.htm(l) or something similar. The SERPS seem to favor pages with the keywords in the url as well as on the page itself. The more matches it finds in anchor text, url text, etc. the more weight it gets.

11-15 really isn't bad though. The best I rank is #9 in any of my industry keywords. Mine are highly competitive though. (60-70M+ hits). Most people will look through the first couple of pages before they give up.

 

BTW. I use a service from hittail.com. It allows me to see where all the traffic is coming from in the search engines and lets me reproduce the search so I can see where I was in the search results. Works well. I get traffic from some pretty odd search keywords. You can use info from the site as well to see what long tail keywords are popular so you can add them into content.

 

I second that. However the keyword market looks more aggressive then it looks.

in title = 30,000
in url = 8,200

 

What I will advice you is to first find a less competitive but still decently searched keyword then do on-page optimization (title tag, descriptions, image tags etc) around those keywords and then do some link building with those keywords and this should be enough for high rankings.