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As with SEO, it's going to take some time to see the fruits of your labor with social media. Twitter is about having conversations with your customers, potential customers, etc. It's not necessarily about the number of followers you have, but about the level of engagement you have with those followers. It's not only the quality of content/information you're sending as EGOL mentions, but also the type of people you're interacting with. Looking at your current Twitter stream, you engage with people quite a bit, but the topics are all over the place. You don't have to ONLY talk about men's clothing, but decide exactly who your audience is (men who buy nice clothes online, or maybe women looking to buy something for their man) and figure out what they talk about. Find a similar type of store as your own and look at their followers. Follow their followers (not necessarily all of them, but this is a good place to start) and see what they're talking about. Try not to just tweet about your site, but tweet interesting articles or facts as well. Again, make sure you take the time first to find out what your audience is interested in. If it's men's clothing, even better. As an example, I have a friend who runs a plus size women's blog and she gained followers by finding the top bloggers in the niche and interacting with them. She also found plus size women's clothing stores and went through their followers and found women she was interested in talking to. After a few months of having conversations with these bloggers and other women she became a part of that community. Her twitter stream is also a personal account so she talks about anything and everything but she focuses on women's fashion and mainly plus size fashion. People who follow her know they're not going to get bombarded with spam and only showing her own blog posts. She's going to tweet great content she finds from across the web related to what many of her followers are also interested in. If you can take this example and figure out how to get into the community where your prime audience is then you've found a great start. Hope this helps!

Cheers. I agree with you. Only problem is when it was set up I wasn't involved in the project at the time. So trying to figure out whats best now. Anyone else? Thanks Will

Just to add a bit, if your pages are being frequently updated you can add a published date and frequency of updates in the XML You can also prioritize the pages (like giving your category pages a higher priority). However, only use these optional parameters in the XML if they will be used correctly and this will definitely help the bots in crawling your site. If your pages hardly ever get updated, then it makes little sense to let Google know in the sitemap that your pages never change.

Hey Will, You know what I would do is put all of your most popular lines toward the top, maybe create a specific category (example: Our Hottest Lines) where all of these will sit. This is not only a solid sales strategy (in my view) because you're keeping all your best selling lines toward the focal point of the screen (after all, this is what a lot of your potential customers are looking for, right?) but also pushing your customers towards popular styles/brands and in turn, hoping to convert. Not only that, but on-page ranking factors would have it that those Hottest Lines links are given greater attention and thus in theory, should rank better vs. a saturated list of alphabetically aligned categories. Categorising with the Alphabet is still another solid strategy, there would be no reason why you couldn't do this in addition to the above (just don't go too mad with your "Hottest Lines", especially if you carry a lot of brands). Closing out, I had a quick look at your site. I would get rid of the scrollbars at the top where your category description is. Instead, I would write some fresh content on each category page interlinking other important pages you want to rank for specific keywords. All the best, Anthony

I always though guest replies would be ignored by Google, is this the case? Guest replies are definitely not ignored by Google. Sometimes you can perform a search for a term and the result will lead you to an article where the search term is only located in the user generated comment section of the page. Our competitor sells clothing but has a reply on a CSS site? Would this be worth doing like this or is it a waste of time? I would suggest working to obtain as broad of a link profile as possible. I like being linked to from credible off-topic sites such as a CSS or graphic design sites for two reasons. First, if it is a follow'd link it offers at least some value and serves to broaden the site's link profile. Additionally if my client's site looks so good it is being mentioned on web design sites, I know the overall design is good. Of course there is the corner case where you are being called out for bad design, but I'll let that topic go In short, receiving mentions or links from design and other off topic sites is nice, but should not be a focus for your link building efforts unless your site is related to those topics.

I'm not sure how your site is setup, but from a coding perspective you just change the text in the text here tags. I would definitely use something more keyword specific for your H1 tags, you can then put other less important titles in H2 or H3 tags. You can always have 2 H1 tags each targeting the different brand/keyword.

Hey Will It's tough to advise you off the cuff on content for your products but do some keyword research, see what people are searching for in relation to these products and see if that gives you any insights. It may give you blog post ideas to pick up pre-purchase search traffic and it may also help you flesh out those product descriptions as they are a bit skinny at the moment. We want to think about the percentage of the total page that is unique and therefore having a longer product description, some reviews or other content that is specific to that page will certainly give you more scope for long tail search and help you stand out from the boilerplate product description merchants. Fashion orientated blog posts about the different products may well be a good way to get some internal keyword rich links and pick up people searching before they are ready to buy. If you can then convert that kind of traffic to your twitter or facebook (or even email) then it all adds up to slowly bringing people in to the site and pushing out what you have to offer. Hope that helps buddy Marcus

While there are generally a number of different ways to do the same thing, you are definitely doing things right.  Its a lot of hard work as I am sure you know, but in the long run and over time you will see benefits from your efforts. Regarding having links of others on your site.  You bet, there is definitely some benefit to having some  outgoing links.  Keep up the good work!

Hi Will, The time required for installation and testing could vary according to whether there are compatibility issues to resolve on the server. As an example - if we were to install an updated version of Wordpress for a client, that could be a 5 minute job, but the new version requires an updated version of PHP on the server and the age and configuration of the server may require patching (or even moving to a newer server) in order to install the correct version of PHP. Then, with all of the software updated and the new version of WP installed, we would need to check and test the installation to ensure that the template is still good and nothing has broken. So, a 5 minute job could easily turn into a 1 or 2 hour job and the need for the additional work will only become known when the installation is attempted (sucks to be us sometimes!) For this reason, most web development companies will probably quote you a minimum of an hour to do the work. Having said that, the hourly rate you have quoted would be considered extremely high by our company. I hope that helps, Sha

Cheers. I would use an SEO company but as a small business and brand owners requiring payments, it will be a few months before we have the cash to do so. So I am trying to learn myself as I have a fair bit of web knowledge and it is something that interests me, so learning SEO would be good for me. I understand the spammy directories etc... but what I am asking is what methods are out there for finding these quality links? Do I just google them, tweet them, facebook them and then see if they rank highly with the mozlabs tools? How do people go about finding them and then getting the owners permission? Whats your email text to them? Cheers Will

Cheers. I have started a campaign for a subfolder www.designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/money-clothing/ and a subdomain www.designerboutique-online.com, should I have chosen root here for designerboutique-online.com? Cheers Will