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I'd be really careful with the directories - make sure you are only submitting to high quality sites.  Being on too many low quality directories is a good way to attract the attention of the Penguin. I think a press release is a good way to start.  You can have one written about the launch of the site.  Use a high quality service like PRWeb.com.  Expensive, but will only get you quality links.  There is also the chance it gets picked up by some reputable news sites.  That's when you see those beautiful little spikes of traffic in analytics

You could make them available via Creative Commons on condition that a link is provided back to the originator's website if they're used. Google have recently stated that they've made an improvement to their algorithm in the way that size is a ranking factor, so make sure the large versions of the image are of decent dimensions, but don't forget to compress the image. And keyword related filenames and alt tags will help people find them of course. Do the pictures look AMAZING? Unique? Professional? If they're great/different photos it'll make people more likely to share them. Some studies have shown that photos with eye contact can be more successful, is the jewellery modelled? And pictures of cute animals always go down well, how about jewellery for dogs, cats, or chameleons etc? How about offering free photos and jewellery to influential bloggers in the niche in return for a review and link? If you created the best step-by-step guide to making jewellery on the Internet, that would get a load of links, but as your client has only just agreed to share the images perhaps they won't be open to doing something like that yet...

Yes very true. Volusion is just extremely limited, and even FTP access is not really FTP access. The software seems to be outdated compared to some other carts, and their "SEO" is just meta data. Open source carts are probably the way to go but will cost more initially.

Thanks for the advice and guide

I personally use Tumblr quite heavily to promote my photography aransphotography.tumblr.com, not so much for link building but there is a huge amount of traffic flowing through that site and its great to divert some of that traffic to my flickr or my own website. Also, if people chose to re-blog my stuff then I get some free links as a bonus, link juice or not! In short my tumblr is part of my social outreach and inbound marketing strategy rather than my link development plans. I do not use wordpress, blogger or Weebly personally, but I do have links on other peoples blogs from there that do me no harm!

Not too bad really - there are some links that could be questionable, but they're just from press releases (the links themselves are OK, it's the other links on the referring sites that are concerning). The only real concern I had was all these 'rubbish' links that had suddenly expired and whether that was going to have some sort of effect on the site. My instinct was telling me that there wouldn't be an issue - but thought I would make use of the community here to see if people had experience of this! Thanks again!

Its a shame there isent an algorithm that one could look at to determiine the value of links

Thanks for the reminder of that post – had completely forgotten about it!

Are you talking about internal or external links, or both? All internal links should be updated to the preferred page. There is an htaccess that will make your non www redirect to www, and also .com/ redirect to .com or vice versa. If your internal links are pointing to a page that redirects to another page, I would say that is not good and would advise to update to the preferred page right away. If your talking external links, there is really nothing you can do about that. I get links to my site from sites I never even heard of before and they tend to get the wrong url on my site as well. Just build a 404 error page to visitors who land on a wrong page can easily navigate back to a page on your site.  For all future external linking strategies, use the preferred landing page. I wouldn't recommend linking to a redirected page if at all possible. Hope I understood your question correctly and my reply is helpful.

It's a risky situation. When you're letting user add content on their own what you get is a large editorial team going through grammar issues, and making sure that you're not being spammed and that your content isn't duplicated (<-- probably the most serious case). You lose quality control. You won't know if a user is spamming this content after it's been published on your site in 10 other network sites.

All the things you listed are important. As for ranking those factors, I would say #1 would be figuring out the goals of your site.  Are you trying to make money?  Build your brand?  What do you want your visitor to do once they get to your site?  What are your landing pages?  Once you have a better grasp of that, then you can start to figure out what keywords to target and how much effort you want to put into it. On-page factors are important of course, most importantly having quality, relevant content.  If you follow SEO best practices and create content that other people find useful, then you're on the right track. As for link building, MozRank, PageRank etc. it's all relative to what your competitors have.  Once you've identified your keywords, you can take a look at the sites that are ranking higher than you in the search engines to figure out how much effort you need to put into linkbuilding to outrank them. Hope that helps.

Joe Thanks so much, your succinct and direct response is very valued, especially because it seems like quite a few replies are self-endorsing.

Hey Sven, Thanks these are some good ideas! Just got to try and keep his 5-10 hours full, shouldn't be too hard, fingers crossed! T

In terms of finding blogs, I really recommend Google Blog search and Technorati amongst other means. Then for identifying the demographics that are reading those blogs, try Google's Double Click Ad Planner. Also, if you want to check how many people in a certain demographic might like certain things, Facebook's ad creator. It's also worth approaching the blogs directly to ask if they have any info about their target demographics.

I'm listed in those two.  They both have editorial staff. I think they are safe to use.  Also listed in Yahoo Directory, BOTW, business.com, goguides.  Have been trying to get listed in DMOZ, but my competitor is the editor In addition to directories, look for general and niche reference sites/desks.

Thanks to both of you, I was kind of worry for being penalized. Thanks.

My company just put up a website recently and I put speed, content, design and architecture first.  But then when I did links this past month it gave rankings a huge boost.  I still need to do on page optimization but have decided to design great landing pages first, then a blog then onsite seo last. As a warning though I would choose industry links and some general high reputation links to start.  My website domain authority doubled last month and my page authority increased 33%. I did the links myself.  I would also be very careful about others building links especially the kinds that are automated.

Yah we've been starting to focus more on that, also upped our Facebook campaign for "likes". We were historically hovering right around 5 than boom down to 15ish. So you're probably right it was Penguin, thanks for the tips.

yep. you're right. I think i was very tired at the point that i read it(I do a lot researching and reading on seo). In theory the Google Penguin Update should look at that site and say "that's not right, what does vacation rental, and computers have to do with hotels?" One reason that Google hasn't done anything about it is because it probably has not re-crawled the page, or it by-passed with enough content before the links at the bottom of the page.

If you are asking that question, the best way to get started is to look at what your competitors are doing. Find every backlink they have in Open Site Explorer (group by domain, external links only). Usually you can find a lot of gold, like awards and sponsorships you weren't aware of, that your business can apply for. Do this for every competitor. Beyond that, link building is often done through link baiting. You can get some traction through a small amount of comment link building and directory listings at some of the major directories. Guest posting is probably the most actionable form of white-hat link building you can do. Once you feel comfortable enough, you can start contacting related websites about adding a link to your website. This might come about as an incentive (a discount in your store, if you have one, as an example) or be paid outright. You can get these for free, I've found, if you engage the website owner in conversation first. Here is a good post on contacting website owners: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/outreach-letters-for-link-building-real-examples-14902