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Theresa,

There was a recent blog post here on SEOmoz that addressed the best types of content to write about and post on your website in order to get links coming naturally to that piece of excellent content. It was this post here: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/7-content-archetypes-that-generate-natural-links. I would recommend that if your website has a blog setup on it that you try to find something that your passionate, excited, and super revved up about to write about. The make it really good. There was also recently a whiteboard friday done by the folks over at vertical measures that explains what the content needs to contain to rank well. It was a very cool study that you might enjoy: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/vm-news/we-cracked-the-content-code-whiteboard-friday/. There is no magic pill or potion to getting backlinks, but if you write from your heart on informative topics that are what your website is about and then share the fact that you wrote something great with people on social media and other leaders in your space you will start to get links. I hope this helps you. Best wishes!

Carla,

We use http://sucuri.net/ to protect our wordpress sites. Not only does it offer some protection, but if you get hacked and have Malware, it tells you right away and real people from their company will remove the malware from your site and get it cleaned up within a couple hours. It's probably not the cheapest service on the market, but it works really really well.

Tim,

We only use Wordpress for all of our non-ecommerce sites. It is so much more than just a blogging platform/cms now. It is very robust with millions supporting the Wordpress community and building plugins. There are also many premium plugins and themes that are excellent right off the shelf and wordpress can be completely customized so that it doesn't look like a template at all. With the right plugin it is very SEO friendly and most themes are responsive that are coming out now and so it is great for mobile. I used Joomla before we switched to WP and we haven't looked back. Just try it and you will love it too!

Wow! Thats a rough one. I thought the incredibly exciting niche of paper shredding was hard Well, I would be interested to know about some of the crazy stories of some of the guys picking up and dumping the trash. Have they ever found anything cool? Anything illegal? That type of thing.

You could compare pricing for a geographic region that you service and make it very graphic heavy. For example where we are some municipalities make you use their dumpsters. Others there are multiple companies all vying for business. You could get the data on the different prices for the different dumpster sizes across all the companies and municipalities in your region and do a mini graphic to accompany a blog post about that. Then you could contact all your typical customers and let them know about this handy reference. This would be good especially if your client was the lower price or has some other unique selling propostion since it would be good for his business.

I know that isn't earth shattering, but there is always a fun way to put a spin on a boring niche. I am sure others will have good ideas too

Rachel,

If your ecommerce cms/platform allows you to use variants that would be one way to avoid showing up with near identical content for the same product. The different thickness bag is simply a variation of the product just like you might have a yellow, black, red, and blue version of the same pair of shoes. Usually a variant is implemented with a dropdown button on the product page.

Carla,

We have been using Sucuri for about 2 years now. I haven't tried it on a Magento site but imagine it would work just as well. I have had to submit probably 6 support tickets for malware removal in that time for various client sites and each time they have cleared it up within the hour. It is pretty great for peace of mind. The first time it happened we spent 3 days trying to figure out what was up and so Sucuri was just a no brainer at that point. All the best to you.