I have been working away on my site for almost a month now, following all the advice I have gotten here and things seem to be going great. I have built a pretty large 400+ number of backlinks from blog posts, press releases, forum posts etc. Everything is very nice and white hat, really almost nothing spammy at all, maybe a couple of blog comments that I shouldn't have made but nothing in the big scheme of things. The problem is that my position in SERP has not changed at all. Its strange my on page SEO got me to the first page of all my keywords but from there I have not moved a bit.
I am local service site and I am still waiting for my pin from google places (third try) and I know that will have a huge effect on my main city. I also have landing pages in 3 other small local cities though and those haven't budged a bit either.
I just wanted to see what people here had to say, possibly I am just not patient enough? it has been probably 1.5 weeks since my links really started to index and show up in webmaster tools.