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.
