Well that sucks, my site dropped from PR3 to PR2 and my efforts to put the site up to page 1 for the keyword I'm targeting has failed.
I have plenty of backlinks but Google Webmasters for the longest time has only shown 7, and still only shows 7.
Wow, only 7 backlinks.... That's probably a far cry from your competition. It definitely does suck that your site went back down to a PR2, which means that its losing some authority in its niche. Personally, I really don't care about PageRank. What are you trying to achieve out of getting a higher PR? In the meantime you need to keeping building backlinks, quality backlinks if at all possible.
What would you suggest to do to build backlinks? My site is in a rather saturated niche, but it's on page 2 for the keyword.
Well, personally, I use article marketing and press release submissions to get my backlinks. This works very well for me as I am on Page 1 for my targeted keywords. Which according to Google I'm competing with over 189,000,000 other websites. Those are just 2 possible ways to go about doing it, but I stick with them because they seems to be working the best for my niche. Social Bookmarking Blog Commenting Video Marketing Forum Signatures and so-on are just some other ways you can go about building backlinks. Content Content Content - Very very very important
Blog commenting is very difficult at this point, very little do-follow blogs and if you put your keyword in the name, they won't approve the comment. Video Marketing?
In my own experiences, Google loves backlinks from different domains, different IPs. In a word, Google would usually give those sites with higher link popularity a better PR. I think you should try to use as more channels as you could in building backlink like social bookmarking, article submission, forum posting, blogging, blog comments and others, especially for niche relative sources. Have a nice day,
It will be very worthy if u can build back links from many sites than getting lots of links from a single website
Dropping from PR 3 To PR 2 has nothing to do with your SERP. I would rather say that you should continue to focus on building backlinks to your site if you really wish to rank high on Search engines. The more the number of backlinks, the higher your chances to rank high on Search Engines.