33gates,
Why are you using http://www.fastmail.fm/ as your website in your profile?
What's the URL to your website?
Timex has excellent advice: submit your sitemap to Google.
Timex,
Extraordinarily beautiful knives on your site. Mine is young and perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, maybe relying on patience would be best... The site is 2 weeks old, I've signed on with Google webmaster tools and "No Data is Available" yet, I've uploaded a sitemap at the myshopify address, http://averyfinefruit.myshopify.com/ and also my personal domain, http://dagstaniandsons.com and I'm reading a lot and learning, slowly...
Caroline,
Thank you as always for being so present and so vigilant in your help. Thanks for catching the URL mistake in my profile and for contributing to my education here.
another tip would be to get started gathering some high impact links. comment on blogs that get crawled frequently. also put some links on digg, facebook, twitter,.........
don't go over board tho. start slowly otherwise your growth might not look organic. some links take longer to get indexed by google others are there within a few hours. I stick to the rule, no more than 20 high impact links and other lower links per day. going to increase it to 50 in two-three weeks so that the growth curve is a progressive one just as any organic growth would be.
and always remember to alternate the anchor texts and use 'dirty' linking with linktexts a normal person would use such as "click here" and also use alternations of www.xxx.com and no www and so on.
when doing SEO always ask yourself would a normal person do half of what I do and the other half can be crystall perfectly optimized.
thanks for the compliment we have just started :)
you would be safe with 10 to 15 links a day since links are not indexed right away, although with the "Caffeine" update things seem to change on a daily basis. I don't start varying anchor text until I hit the first page, then I slow down the link building a bit and let it slide to the top. Never stop building links though when you get to your position. I consistently maintain 2-3 new links a day once I am at my 1st or 2nd result spot on page one.
@Timex and @Joseph, would you be open to sharing a little more detail about your link-building strategies? Seems like there can be a real science to it and yet I'm half-wondering whether the time and energy spent on link strategy could in some cases be devoted to something more organic; e.g., perhaps a store owner could just be writing posts on his own blog about the store's products, about the way he does business, etc.
So I guess what I'm wondering is, when you say things like 10 to 15 links a day, what does that mean concretely? Where are you posting these links and how long does it take you to post 10, 15, 20, etc. links?
Not trying to poach your trade secrets here, I'm just curious about the more technical aspects of this approach to SEO.
@Ben Dunlap
I am purely self taught at SEO. There are many ways that I build back links.
My strategy consists of the following for a good mix.
Do follow blog comments 4-5 a day on relevant blogs
Guest posting on others blogs 1-3 times a week (My Blog Guest)
Write an article or two a week and submit each one 2-3 times to different article directories
Forum scavenger hunts and contests generate back links
On site contests submitted to sweeps sites
Coupon codes submitted to coupon code sites
You Tube Videos
Tweeting
Onlywire Social Book Marking $2.99/mo
Posting on a blog network with unique class c ip addresses for each blog $59/mo
Free Directory Submissions
SEO Moz pro tools i.e. Juicy Link Finder
These are just a few of the ways I am marketing my store
what I also do is check the backlinks from my competitors to get my own link at these sites to basically balance the score.
http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/mastering-keyword-research-and-seo-competition/
listen to this webinar on market samurai which lets you do so much stuff it's hard to beat. you can get complete lists from your competitors with anchor text and so. yes I know other tools do that for free but just watch the video and you'll know why this tool is so great.
also you should read the entire blog. the author is just going through a challenge in which he reveals everything he does to optimize his niche site. also applicable to online shops.
you should also subscribe to viperchill.com
my strategie is fairly simple ... don't overdo it. I look for longtail keywords that have less competition, place some nice links combined with some low value links and that's usually enough to get into the top10 at least.
I had dummy website up before I made the shop public which was barely optimized but made it into the top 25 of almost all keywords except my main keyword. I'm only starting now to push the real store.
apart from that I follow the strategy of organic growth. I imagine how would my site grow through which channels and also where I could make a dime from. meaning participating in forums (not just lurking but actually contributing) and when the time is right I place my link somewhere. either thread or signature and people will accept that since I'm part of the community.
additionally I have a list of 500+ German cooking blogs. some are inactive -> link in comment section, some are active -> active participation without links in the comment section and eventually suggesting a guest blog. bloggers in general love other peoples guest blogs since they don't have to do the work for once.
one more thing: I subscribed to google alerts. I have my main 3 keywords and get an update every day with news from around these keywords. either new articles on article bases (found my main competitiors hunting ground through that!) or general news. place a link to your website in these sites and you should see quick results. advantage is the site is already indexed in google so your comment will get indexed pretty soon as well.
and there is so much more to do but you only have a few hours per day :)
*edit* always name your collection handles (the one you see in the browser) after the actual keyword not some generic number or something. advantage is when you do a dirty link without anchor text like in above example from smartpassiveincome the link has the keywords in it even without anchor text.
one more thing: I stick to the rule no more than 25% of your links may go to the index the rest needs to go to collections or single products. it's way more organic this way and your collections are what the user is actually looking for. if he finds it without browsing through your page first your chance of conversion is much higher.