I agree with Tom.  Backlinks can be from anywhere as long as they don't appear to be blatant spam.  I tend to agree that a backlink serves a greater purpose than just link juice and may actually send relevant traffic and business to your company.  I would try to target as many local links as possible, but branching out to a global mindset won't hurt at all.

Just create a redirect in your htaccess file with the old URL to the new URL.  There are multiple plugins that support this feature on WordPress such as "simple redirect" etc.

When it doubt Google.  Syndicating all your reviews with a plus profile will only help your SEO strategy.  The only time I would prefer another review site is if it was specific to my industry like urbanspoon for restaurants or angies list for contractors.

there are no particular rules, but I think its important to have your links stand out from body text for a user experience.  I would also recommend having a visited link and a hover color change as well.

Here are my comments...

1. Guest Blogging - Is he planning to write blogs for other websites or is he getting people to guest blog for his website?  I don't think its bad for him to guest blog for other websites as long as its not spamish material.  Guest blogging can be an SEO benefit, but more importantly I think it may drive wanted traffic if he is writing awesome material.

2. Press Release Marketing is a tad outdated and if I am not mistaken Google doesn't even look for press releases anymore. I don't think its a bad practice for realistic Press Release items such as new product lines, business mergers or something of that sort.

3)Blog Commenting will have little to no effect on his SERPS.  If he chooses to manually do blog comments that are informative and not anchor text driven then that will be fine.

I always believe that as an SEO consultant you should drive your meetings and the strategies. If a client has a different idea and doesn't budget it might be time to fire them

It really depends, if you respond with "Google geo-locates your business services" , he may reply and say "my competitors a,b,c,d are ranking for "city keyword, why can't you deliver that".  My only advice is to optimize his Google Places listing to get him ranking for those local keywords.  There really is not a way to optimize for 50 cities and 80 zipcode without having duplicate content.  Also it seems that your client has taken a strategy role, he hired you to for search engine optimization and you should be delivering the strategy to him.  You make be able to back your case by showing traffic measures.

I would set up a splash page letting people know that the page is going to be redirected.  I believe if your receiving decent traffic to your site that the end user's experience is more important than the search engine value.  You could also set up a splash page that reads they will automatically be redirected within "set amount of seconds"

there are no particular rules, but I think its important to have your links stand out from body text for a user experience.  I would also recommend having a visited link and a hover color change as well.

When it doubt Google.  Syndicating all your reviews with a plus profile will only help your SEO strategy.  The only time I would prefer another review site is if it was specific to my industry like urbanspoon for restaurants or angies list for contractors.

Just create a redirect in your htaccess file with the old URL to the new URL.  There are multiple plugins that support this feature on WordPress such as "simple redirect" etc.

I would set up a splash page letting people know that the page is going to be redirected.  I believe if your receiving decent traffic to your site that the end user's experience is more important than the search engine value.  You could also set up a splash page that reads they will automatically be redirected within "set amount of seconds"