Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Build interesting and useful content and people will link to it. You have probably heard this a thousand times if you have even begun looking into link building and SEO. While it is a great motto to live by, it won't get you started. Without some initial link building effort your website will be as good as the tree that fell in the woods when nobody was around.

Step 1) Some tips for getting started... I always like to start each new site with a blog. I take a little time each week away from my standard work to write a single highly interesting blog post in the topic area. It is important than you don't just write filler posts, but actually focus on interesting titles and topics that will grab a reader. After each post, use any social media connections that you have to distribute a link. Now go back about your business. You will be surprised how this can help your site get started. If the posts are good, you are likely to get at least a few initial links. Google also likes to see the regular content updates and it helps you to build some rapport.

Step 2) Know your competitors and make sure that you are offering better, more interesting content. If you don't have better stuff, how can you expect to win? Once you have the site set up, focus on building links until you get a regular stream of traffic. Try whatever non-tacky links you can obtain. I would recommend a few easy directory listings and try to do a couple of guest posts for a blog related to your niche.

Step 3) Once you have some visitors flowing through your pages regularly, it is time to knock the competition out of the park. This is where the "Build interesting and useful content and people will link to it" comes into play. You should be asking yourself constantly what do my visitors want that my competitors don't have. Try to come up with any ways to get your visitors to interact more with your site, and encourage them to share things via social media. If you have the right effort, this is where your link building will really take off (and you aren't even focusing on link building).

Hope this helps.

My keyword rankings did not update. It says updates every Thursday and the last update shows as Aug 23 (which was the original update). Any idea why this would happen and how I can get the updated info?

The purpose of your sitemap is to tell Google to go out and index the pages you specify. The purpose of the robots.txt is to tell Google not to index the page. The warning is likely just a precaution to let you know that you may have by accident requested them to block something in robots.txt. If you remove the URL's from your submitted sitemap the warnings should disappear. If you leave them, you will have warnings but Google should not index the content since your blocked it in robots.txt.

I think this depends a lot on what the text of the body looks like. If in general, the first couple of lines of the body is a good introduction that would inspire someone to click on the search result, then that would be a fine way to go. Otherwise you may want to trust Google. They do a pretty good job of selecting some relevant text for you.

If all of these are product pages, another option may be to dynamically create a generic yet enticing first sentence that the name of the product could be inserted in to and follow it with the first line from the body. So something like "Our <insert product="" name="">is the greatest thing since sliced bread. <insert custom="" text="" from="" the="" body="" to="" fill="" rest="">". So you would yield results like "Our door slide is the greatest thing since sliced bread...." and "Our black cabinet knob is the greatest thing since sliced bread....".</insert></insert>

Note my choice of initial phrase was more for comic relief. I would especially avoid that if the store also sells sliced bread

Trying to find common links among your competition is a good start (if they all can get a link for site A, you should be able to as well). Divide any potential candidates up into groups depending on how likely you think you are to achieve the link. Try to spend more effort on the one that you feel likely to pan out.There are some obvious things to rule out like links from sites that appear to have been dead for some time and old news articles/posts. If you run out of good options on your direct competition, you might turn to other places that you don't directly compete with, but that have similar real estate.

Another idea is to try to find some good real estate blogs and write a couple of interesting to read guest posts that you can submit. This method works really good. You offer up interesting content to the blog and in return you get a link back to your site.