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I think it really does not matter but personally I would focus on cleaning up your link profile then focus on your quality content to gain natural links and social shares.

You can reach out to other web masters to achieve links but honestly (if you have a manual penalty) I would be focusing my time and efforts on getting the penalty lifted first.

I would give it a shot yourself, You can do much of it yourself and even outsource small time consuming tasks. I had this same problem as you with my website Dates Of Asia and even sourcing other contractors to do this for me my reconsideration request was still denied so after spending the money I decided to do it myself. I found that this approach is much better as you know yourself some of your links that are good links but somebody else might consider them to be bad links.

First off read this post it is what helped me to help myself and ultimately gave me the motivation to do this all myself.  Ultimate Guide To Google Penalty Removal

Work your way through this, I found that Link Detox was essential in this. Basically you can export the results to an excel spreadsheet and then pay somebody else to attempt contact of the links you want removed. Keep the spreadsheet updated. Then pay somebody to go through and check each link if it is still there, if it is then add it to the disavow tool. Write up your re-consideration request and include details of what you have done with examples.

It really is not that hard, it is just time consuming but for those long tedious tasks you can just pay somebody else to do those. It is much cheaper than paying $3,000 and I am sure that money will be better spent elsewhere in development or advertising.

Hope I could be of help.

Well I am only new myself but from what I know you want to stay away from blog comments and signatures. Quality articles are an option.

Of course your best links will come from genuine sources linking to your content but if you are going to source your own links as well I think quality articles on quality blogs is your best bet.

Thanks for that. I really appreciate your input.

I actually joined MOZ purely because I was following the QA reading the new topics each night for a few weeks. That was what convinced me to join. I have come across so many problems with MOZ and honestly still do not have any idea what I am really doing but I can post in QA which is good.

The on-Page grader is my favourite tool for a beginner like myself. But I am hoping in time they fix the issues I have found and I am sure there will be plenty more out there worth me taking up the $99 a month. (Fingers Crossed)

Something I have been trying to figure out. On my website each member can have up to 10 images. When viewing a profile you can select each different photo and we currently use javascript to display this in a small box so the page does not re-load.

I am curious for ideas, would we be better off having the images load on a different page? Giving more pages per visit in GA or would a lightbox type pop up be optimal. My concern is that the lightbox (similar to how Facebook displays images) would be a violation of google adsense TOS. I tried to talk with a help desk member from google regarding this but I am not even sure they could speak english to understand what I was saying.

What do you guys think? When it comes to handling groups of images how would you best display them for user happiness and search engine optimisation?

I agree I have read somewhere that the less sub folders the better. So having your domain name, the category name and then a item name would be best practice.

And of course detailed SEO friendly names and not the post numbers ect.

So in theory they are identical?

Just different ways of achieving the same result

As the type of person who would pay somebody for such services I would have to say that it depends on your actual skills and abilities.

How many hours work do you see this taking or should I say how much of your time would it take to acheive this.

Considering you are not only doing the SEO work but you are creating the website as well. Perhaps look at breaking the cost down on a per client basis. For example one clients website might be small but another client they might require a much more involved website.

If this is your primary source of income I would suggest asking yourself what do you need to survive? If you can do all this in one week then what do you need to survive for one week? Once you have built a reputation and have clients under your belt then perhaps you could charge more?

Sorry I know I did not actually answer your question but I hope I have given you some "Food for thought"