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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

Emphasis on keywords in the domain name was actually reduced. You definitely don't want to switch domains, as that alone comes with a lot of SEO problems.

I would instead suggest focusing on keywords that have less competition than 'fabric.' You can still focus on the keyword while doing other campaigns. You'll find as you build more links ranking for the tougher goals becomes much easier.

If you Google your brand name 'Beverlys' and look at the cached page, and then switch to text view, you see that a lot of your homepage content is links. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but the lack of content is working against you.

How are you handling link building? I didn't look at the OSE data, but just using PageRank as a quick metric, the #1 result for 'Fabric' has a PR8, while you are PR3. Look at OSE data for ideas on link building, as well as looking at the link building section of the SEOmoz blog.

Here is a particular link building with eCommerce article I enjoyed:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/creative-link-building-for-ecommerce-sites

As an addendum to that, focus on getting customers to build content for you with reviews. Decide how to create a community around your niche and build it. You would be surprised at how willing customers are to give you free content.

Mr. Thomas is correct - BMR was no better than any other article marketing service.

They didn't do spun content, but they let anything through the review process. They also had extremely poor support for creating an article with any type of media or custom styles -- they set themselves up for disaster. And their special 100-word  blog post service was by definition a grave SEO mistake.

I canceled my membership six months before they bit the dust because they ignored my suggestions to fix these simple items.

To add, I also would not call this a private network. Anyone with $67 could get into the network. That isn't very private is it?

So is article marketing dead? No. You just have to focus more on guest posting unique content and participating in networks that require quality content. Even Unique Article Wizard was hit but isn't completely dead. They still practice spun content though, so I'd suppose it's not exactly still a long term solution (although they got through panda just fine)

The owner of One Hour Backlinks made a comment a few days back about his service, recommending it as a supplement to your link building campaign. Maybe commenting on auto-approve blogs worked for him, but I'd strongly recommend staying away from this.

SEO is quickly becoming synonymous with marketing, building PR, and networking. Rand did a post on this not too long ago I believe.

I wouldn't slow the crawl rate. A high crawl rate is good so that Google can keep their index of your website current.

The better solution is to reconsider your hardware and networking setup. Do you know how you are being hosted? From my own experience with a website of that size, a load balancer on two decent dedicated servers should handle the load without problems. Google crawling your pages shouldn't create noticeable overhead on the right setup.

Yes. It should always be practice to noindex any vhost on the development and staging servers.

Not only will duplicate content harm them, but in one personal case of mine, the staging server was outranking the client for their own keywords! Obviously Google was confused and didn't know which page to show in SERPs. In turn this confuses visitors and leads to some angry customers.

Lastly, having open access to your staging server is a security risk for a number of reasons. It's not so serious that you need to require a login, but you should definitely keep staging sites out of SERPs to prevent others from getting easy access to them.

For comparison, the example I gave where the staging server outranked the client, the client had a great SEO campaign and the staging server had several insignificant links by accident. So the link building contest doesn't always apply in this case.

The first might not be ethical. You could try your tactics on a website you are associated with, and already is an established domain. As a personal example, I created a Magento extension to handle administrating category attributes. For my own case study I wanted to try out, I pointed links at the Magento Connect store that hosts the plugin page instead of a blog post or store page I developed. Some probably have ethical problems with this. One downside is you don't have access to Analytics, but tracking keywords shouldn't be tough.

The next is to grab up domains and start testing away. This is how I got started back in SEO around 6 years ago. Grab whoisguard to protect others from seeing domain registration information if you are worried. Personally, I wouldn't be. After all, who really cares that you are testing SEO out on a domain that no one cares about? (Although, I will say, your guinea pig websites often graduate testing status and become worthwhile websites without you intending)

Hope that helps. Maybe others have more ideas.

Disclaimer: Justin Anderson owns OneHourBacklinks.com.

Somehow when he shows up, negative opinions of OHB get downvoted. So Justin, what's wrong with discussion and personal experience? If you mean for us to take your claims seriously, I would have thought you would provide a case study or answer our qualms instead of downvoting everyone.

No offense. Really cool web design, by the way.

What Schema data are you referring to? Different microtags will apply to different pages. Generally, anywhere you can use a microtag, you should.

Their website and service seems down, so looks like you don't have a choice either way.

I do remember seeing the website when it was up. They are blog comments from ScrapeBox. This is not a good backlink building strategy, and I'd strongly recommend not using them.

I recall a post in /r/SEO about a case study, and there weren't any positive results. Keep in mind this was pre-Panda. I would imagine ordering a service like this would be playing with fire.

Is it the same article? If not, syndicate away. If so, personally I would only publish the author tag on my own website, and delay syndicating it until Google indexes it. Assuming of course, syndicating the exact article is mandatory, and unique content isn't possible.

Copy and pasted what, exactly? If it's specifications, that's perfectly fine. If you are really worried about it (I would not be, I have clients that post specifications like this), you could always include the specifications in a PDF and offer a link to that. That's less helpful to visitors though, and they are really who you should be targeting first.

If it's a product description, then yes, that's definitely no good. Write your own description. Include a staff review. This paired with the ability for users to review/comment on the product will give you enough unique content to shine.

Look at big e-retailers if you want to see how others are doing content. Cabelas has a Q & A section, for example. Show widgets like Amazon does ('Customers Who Bought This Also Bought..) and provide short descriptions for each product tile.

Include video content if you can, or relevant how-tos. MidwayUSA does a good job of having supporting content.

Use microtags for everything you possibly can.

That should be enough work to last you a year! Cheers.

You should really just add that to your disallow list in your robots.txt file. That's the easiest method.

<code>User-agent:  *  Disallow:  /customer/</code> 

More information on RogerBot.

You have five separate breadcrumbs for the product I'm viewing. That's the spammy part.

I looked at a product page -- it's very obvious you are keyword stuffing. Don't do that.

Are tags bad? Tag clouds are, most often:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=bYPX_ZmhLqg#!

StackOverflow.com has a cool usage of tag clouds that aren't spammy.

Categories serve the same purpose as tags .. why not use them instead? Breadcrumbs are perfectly okay, and actually serve a purpose to the user. Looking at your implementation, though, your breadcrumbs would be considered keyword stuffing.

Highly unlikely. Why would a CTR matter at all, in Google's perspective?

I'd even wager that CTR of actual Google SERPs isn't used. The CTR doesn't really tell you anything without providing false positives.

Yes, Google does not use them for anything. The Bing team also said they have used it as a spam signal.

Sorry no source on the latter fact, since that was a random video. But there is this:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Google didn't condemn comments. Or comment link building.

Fire and brimstone comes when you use the likes of ScrapeBox to submit to hundreds or thousands of blogs, in a small timeframe, with not many varying phrases.

You're fine adding your domain. I'd even consider it an opportunity lost if you didn't.

20 Miles is too insignificant to warrant the need for two separate profiles. If you planned on doing community outreach and the offices were in different states, that'd make sense.

Just put your main office in the address field and be sure to list the second address somewhere in the information page.

Why not keep Buddypress, but disallow search-bot traffic to the root directory where it resides? You can easily do that in robots.txt.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /buddy-press-directory/

Without more details on your ads, and what they said specifically, I doubt you will find much help.

When a company sends you a generic disapproval message, it's because they decided they don't want to waste human resources on explaining things that are clearly outlined. Google Adwords/Adsense is the same way. I would suggest looking over the terms carefully again.

Sorry, wish I could help more. Maybe link us to some examples.