Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Here is my opinion on each of the items you are in:

I am not a fan of directory submissions.

3-5 guest posts is a good idea as long as the site you are submitting to has a lot of traffic and isn't super spammy with other guests posts.

I am a fan of local business directories - it will help you in your local footprint and will allow you to build some authoritative links.

Forum and signature backlinks are abused and overused.  The only time I would actually consider using this is if the forum site actually provide you leads (For example, a business message board, marketing forum, business community)

Squidoo Lens are now No Follow and also contain a ton of spam.  I think you would be better of building a blog on your website and building original content there.

I still think there is value in blog commenting as long as you are providing diverse anchor text and valuable non spam links.

I would consider this spam.  If you are ranking number one for a keyword and someone visits and leaves your site without a conversion, there was a reason for it.   Dominating multiple spots might sound like a great idea, but it is going to be hard to formulate unique content when you are targeting such similars keywords.  I would rebuild my original content to reflect multiple variances of the keyword and make sure that page is super authoritative and try to rank naturally.

Sync your website with Google Webmaster and use the disavow tool.

Im in favor of buying domains that are close to your brand and redirecting, but buying over 100+ domains to redirect isn't smart.  Unless they have a strategy built around populating unique content around them - its not a good move.

I would personally would hire a full time SEO consultant.  I wouldn't want that company doing SEO for me and definitely don't like what they are offering.  They say there method is Google Penguin accepted, but its super spammy.  Eventually it will be caught by Google and you will be left in a worse place.

I guess the main thing to think about is....

if they are not automating this process how in the world is it worth for them to supply all those links, articles etc for that price point each month?  If its not automated then its definitely contracted out overseas.

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.

There are multiple paid directories - as far as what is worth the price tag?  It really depends on what your competition is supporting in their link profile.  I personally don't engage in any paid directories, not because I feel like I'm going to get penalized, but I don't think any of the sites are worth a yearly amount.

1)Yahoo
2) Business Directory 
3) Best of the web
4) BBB

Hey Carla,

There are a bunch of different security measures you can take to protect your websites on the server side and on the wordpress side.  My company specializes in WordPress Security.  If you would like to PM I could give you some rates per site or a bundle for all of them.

Use the same link structure as your old site (-) the .html.  Then set up 301 redirects for each page in your .htaccess and you should carry over the majority of your link juice.

I would say that our traffic and our clients traffic varies 2%-11% for Bing depending on the niche.  I actually think search engine traffic is directly related to what industry you are in.  I know Google is considered the benchmark, but Bing does have a nice interface as well and all my sites seem to rank higher on bing anyway :P.

Google adwords tool is a great tool, but you can also use the competition keyword analysis tool to see how hard it would be to obtain those rankings.  There are also sites like wordtracker.com which can also assist.

In my experience I don't think its going to negatively affect your SEO it is just a better practice to keep everything lowercase.  The only thing you do not want is the search engine viewing the same page 2x as separate pages creating duplicate content.  If these are relatively new pages I would go ahead and fix them, but if they have any significant link juice to them i think its fine to leave as is.

Genesis is by the best framework to use.  We use it on all of your clients websites and integrate Yoast with it.

Here are just a few sites we have recently completed using Genesis:

http://shadow-soft.com/ http://www.thekentlawgroup.com/ http://www.eitanrosenthal.com/?lang=en

Before we were just using our own custom framework, but this provides a lot of stability and once you get the hang of the framework anything is possible.

Im sure it is possible it could devalue down the road, but Title, URL and Body are one of the easiest ways to identify if the content is relevant.  Google also takes in account bounce rate so if 'title', 'url' and 'body' are targeting 'shoes', but your website is about garage install it will be able to tell immediately that your site is not relevant.

Might be best to use someone that has specific knowledge of WordPress security to lock your site down. Plugins generally don't catch everything and certainly do not lock you down from further attacks.  There are a few steps that you can take to make sure your site won't be infected through simple scripts and brute force.  If you need a referral for a security guys let me know.

If you are going to utilize blog commenting just do it naturally.  When I make blog comments I do not use Anchor Text as my name and I vary my URL from homepage, inner page and social media pages.  I find that a well formulated blog comment can give you so SEO benefit along with some direct traffic to your website.

I think its important to keep your logo as an image to keep your "alt text".  It really depends on what you are trying to achieve.  It sounds to me that you are trying to increase your speed optimization of your page which directly can affect your SEO.  If your site is optimized and you can keep your logo in as an image I would keep it.  If you making your logo into a sprite increases you page speed a lot and gives it a big boost in performance (highly doubt it) than do it.

Depends what industry you are in.  I think some industries it is essential for someone to know the location and competition professionally rather then just using the same tactics they would normally use.

What he is trying to say is the package doesnt offer anything of value.  I would say that 90% of what he is proposing is automated and spun content. I think you meed to realize how much time all of that would take if submitted manually.  I would run for the hills or hire a reputable consultant here for more money

We use Istock - I believe you get what you pay for in the stock photography area.  There are some free stock photos, but you have to be careful with royalty free etc.

I have been using the Fresh Web Mentions.  Not sure if that is all that accurate, but pretty much lets me know when new mentions have been indexed.

I always vary my anchor text (external or internal).   I would also caution using anchor text in abundance.  I would make it look natural by using (click here), the actual page name, variations of the keywords you are targeting.

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 be proactive and email the website to take the link down.  If they do not reply in 24 hours I would use the disavow tool and make sure to cover your tracks.

Depending on what platform you are using you are going to want to make these pages as no index in your robots file.  Alternatively WordPress and other promising CMS allow you to mark a page not be indexed. using a plugin.

Keywords in URLs definitely help your pages rank better for the keywords you are trying to target.  The more precise your URL is to your keyword the better off you are.  As long as your content is consistent and provides value there shouldn't be any issues with google.

I would keep them as do follow and just brand with your company name.  Don't use any keywords such as web design.  You will not be penalized for a branding anchor text of your company name, unless your company names is 'shoes' and at that point why would you need to do any seo work

Not really a spammy link promo or anything, but I have an SEO client who ranks number 1 for...

generic keyword such as :  "land survey company" and 20 surround cities.  He emailed me a couple day ago asking me to target "company surveying city name" sigh....

In my personal experience I always find silos a positive strategy as long as its not natural and not overblown.   I think it makes a user's experience more concentrated and in turn will help your on site time and make it easier for you to build links for a specific term.

I think that is also a good answer, but I believe you have to take in consideration your anchor text diversity.  If you have been targeting this "phrase" with any consistency and then you add 2k more instances of this keyword it could pose as some trouble and look unnatural.  Remember linking is about looking as natural as possible, so if you think that is covered then you should be in good shape

I believe Google is against paid directories that accept everyone.  Directories such as Yahoo, BOTW etc charge a fee, but those fees can be considered an editorial fee.  Believe it or not high quality directories actually do reject applicants.

In google's guidelines it tells you to submit to directories, but people ended up taking that and submitting their site to thousands of directory sites not matter the quality.  Submit to the big high quality directories and you will be fine.  Make sure that the directory page you are submitting to has a higher page authority that way you can pass some link juice.  These are my personal practices and beliefs and may vary with other people on this site.

Honestly I think there is way too much going on the page.  I find the layout hard to follow. I would like to see an image-slider with nice crisp photos and text below it.  Also I think you need to integrate a more clear and defined call to action to your website.