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I believe the correct approach is using "no-index, follow" with robots in the search pages.  Not sure how to do that, though...

I've gotten a website to the top in less than 30 days before.  I had hundreds of domains already pointing at it, no competition and only had to throw in a keyword for the title tag.  Quite impressive, right?

But really, there are ways to achieve immediate top rankings for low-medium competition words, but many will get you knocked down as fast as you came up.  The only difference would be getting a high quality relevant link from places like the New York Times.

Are you utilizing an unused browser, and clearing out all the cookies/history/data before checking rankings?

You are partially correct.  Poor content is bad, too.  You would need to spend a lot of time on making a system that generated substantial unique content, but it could be time well spent.

Have you tried getting links from a gemological institute?

Make a real world comparison on the the three C's of diamonds, with videos of real women trying to tell the difference.  Ask bloggers, gemological institutes and other jewelry stores to link to it.

Costume designer?

If you design some of your own rings then you could work with a costume designer to make some simple jewelry.  Ask for a link for your efforts.  Maybe write a review of their recent play, and ask for a link from them on it.

Wedding Planner?

Not sure how this one would work, but you might!

Photographers?

Offer to use some of your really nice jewelry in some staged pictures.  Ask the photographer for credit on the jewelry in the photos.

Florists?

Every woman loves the gift of flowers and jewelry, why not find a way to work together?  You could also write an article about choosing the best flowers for the occasion, and ask for links from them.

You could also create a gift widget.  Submit the event, preferences, price range and the widget would produce gift ideas.  Embed a link to your website from it as the source, and try to get people to put it on their website.

For any of these people you could offer some SEO advice in trade for a link on their website.

As for your actual question, it's all about risk vs reward.  Some companies try to go after links in a very natural way, and some companies just try obtain links.  The first is going to be very beneficial, but quite expensive.  The latter will also be beneficial, but carry more risk.  It all depends on what you are looking for.

You have quite a bit of activity already on your Facebook page, so I would just link your website over to your profile.

Also, I would suggest creating a Facebook specific conversion page on your website, and iframing it into a Facebook tab.  That way you can still collect contact info/email addresses to continue to market to people.

I can't remember the exact size of the iframe, but its something like 520px wide, but the suggested size is 480px in order to fit a scroll bar in the window.

Other options:

Use reviews on your product pages (I'd suggest utilizing Schema markup - http://www.schema-creator.org)

Hiring out to college kids looking for a few bucks

Hiring freelancers

The best solution would be to work within your Content Management System to provide the best possible Title and H1 Tag for your customers, and then use an auto-generator to produce content.  I work with companies that have less than 1000 products, so I don't have a lot of experience with the auto-generators, but it will give you a slight benefit.

If I were dealing with that many DVD's I would make landing pages for each Genre, some for major actors/actresses and major directors, and go after those niches while I hammered out the issues with my content management system.

I'd use Open Site Explorer to check their backlink profile.  Check to see what kind of links they were able to generate for themselves, and then check on a few of those websites to see if they are indexed by Google.

I had a company try to sell me SEO+Link Building, but their whole link building network had been banned by Google.

Which one converts better for you?  For me it's my website, so I wouldn't dream of sending them away.  However, I have friends that convert much better on Facebook.

Conversions are all about testing to find what works, and keep building on that.

Yahoo uses Google in Japan (not that you, or anyone really cares).

Yes, Google will knock you for it.

Start with your most popular product, and work your way down.  Also, make sure you write the content for the consumer, and not for your company.

Another suggestion I would have is personalizing your website.  Brand yourself as an expert within the content, and mark the products that you suggest.  If you have a favorite hammer, make sure people can quickly identify it.

For references, check out Gun Dog Supply http://www.gundogsupply.com/

How's your internal linking structure?

Do a site: domain.com check to see how Google perceives your internal linking.  Are your relevant pages on the first page of your site search?  If not, you may have an internal linking problem.

To check this I used a web based program to find all the outbound internal links of each page on my website (only 200 pages).  I then transferred this data into Excel where I sorted it by page.  From here I was able to see that my most important pages had 20 less links than the unimportant pages in front of it. I then went through my website adding additional links to my important pages, using the same keywords I was trying to rank them for, until they had the most internal links pointing at them.

Internal linking is typically a problem with websites that didn't plan ahead for SEO.

Link Building is starting to be a transition back to College.  You have to write high quality content that identifies, and utilizes references.  In addition to just being structurally, grammatically and intellectually sound, you also have to have it fill a niche within your market.

For example:

You notice that several university websites have an incomplete analysis of the water shed on a predominant mountain range in their area.  You could collect resources online about this topic, and write a complete analysis of how it effects the people around it.  You could then request links from these universities to link to your complete article.  After you go through the 15-20 relevant universities you could start contacting the cities, real estate agencies and some guiding services to link to your article.

As long as you write a high quality piece of content that people will find informative and enjoyable you should generate a few links.  Of course, I would suggest picking a more interesting topic, but this is just hypothetical.

That being said:

I would suggest The Interenet Marketing Ninjas (formerly We Build Pages) and Virante.  Both of these companies have reputations for being great link builders, but you pay for high quality safer links.

If you aren't overly concerned with the risks, and you have a smaller budget, you could also talk to a link broker company like Text Link Brokers, who will assist you in purchasing links (which is a no-no if found).  I don't mean to alarm you, Text Link Brokers is a great company that doesn't give out their client info, but it would be careless of me not to mention that there is a risk.

As long as its related to your field, then yeah.  I'd also take a look to see if a link from here will generate either reoccurring traffic or a sale.  It gets monotonous when you link build without any benefits in the near future.

For example:

I received immediate traffic and achieved goals from a low quality blog with a lot of followers.

First off, if the keywords are pretty related, having similar synonyms, then it can be pretty easy to rank for all three.

For Example, I used my home page to target: Car Dealerships City, City Car Dealerships, City Used Cars, City State Car Dealerships, etc.

Since all of these are so relevant to each other, it made things as easy as just talking about my business in my city-state.

However, my internal pages are very specific: City state auto repair, city state car rentals, etc.

Point is, if your top three keywords are about the same topic, then it can be easy to rank for all three on the home page.  However, if they are different, and highly competitive (Diets and Gyms), then you are going to need to split up the content into different pages to rank well.

As for which pages you should focus on, it depends on your current rankings, and traffic.  If you currently rank pretty well overall for your home page, then get it bumped up to the top to increase traffic.  After that, start working on all the other pages.

If you aren't ranked well yet, and you don't have much traffic, then go after a niche phrase with decent search with all your internal pages.  This will help your bottom line more - easier conversions - and still help your overall domain authority.  I'm having to turn around, and do this with all of my websites that I took over (In-House SEO).

Funny, I forgot about that aspect.  Great answer!

I don't know if this is the case, but occasionally there are ranking spasms.  For example:

I ranked #2 for the search "City Car Dealerships" even though I am located over 150 miles away.  To make things even more complicated, I had used that phrase one time in all of my pages of content, and did so as a comparison.  For all intensive purposes I shouldn't have ranked that well for it.  Anyway, I stayed at that position for about 2 weeks, and have since dropped down to page two - where I should probably rank.

My advice would be to keep checking things out, but don't stress too much unless it lasts more than a few days.

7. And ask which keywords the website is trying to rank for, and check to see if it is.

Mobile apps are a must if you are doing this, I agree.