sirkevon - 12:11 am on Oct 29, 2009 (gmt 0)

I'm think I have come to a point where obtaining backlinks for a product site in a particular niche is proving to be more and more difficult. Let's say for example a site sells home furniture. They don't actually make any of it, they're just a supplier. And all of their targeted keywords are competitively broad based such as furniture, coffee tables, dining room tables, and so on and so forth. So I started optimizing on-page, asked for links, created a blog used to write features that link back to the site as well as other informative tips, comment on popular forums, writing articles and press releases, created and used social media sites like Twitter, and submitted base feeds to product listing sites. I send out e-mail newsletters, and once in while I'll do a giveaway that hopefully nets the site some links. All this and the site has accumulated thousands of backlinks with a link profile that includes low, middle, and high quality links, and for most of these broad based keywords (as well as some pretty good longtail ones) the site is ranked at the least within the first or second pages of Google. Some are in the top five even. Not bad, right? But when you're working for a client, sometimes they just don't think that's good enough unless you're in the top 3.

At this point, I feel like I'm maintaining my rankings in terms of the link building I've been doing. I'm having a hard time finding what it takes to put you over the top. When it happened before on a couple keywords that hit #1, I felt like I hit the jackpot. As if it was blind luck that it happened. Of course, I'm not going to tell my boss that. :) But getting back to my point, would it just be to keep doing what I'm doing and pray at this point, or is there something more I can do?