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Mememax,  thank you.  I did not know this.

Have you tried the Custom 404 Widget?

That happened to us too.  We had a huge FAQ page and decided to reduce it's length by placing the answers behind tabs.  It made the page neat, but, when that content went behind the tabs a lot of unique words were hidden.  Previously that page received a lot of long tail traffic but after the diverse words were placed behind the tabs the long tail traffic collapsed.

People who run PPC campaigns should be focused on the average cost for a conversion and the average profit on a sale.  These can vary wildly as traffic blasts arrive from various sources that might have purchase intent or not.  As soon as the eye is removed from the cost of what you are doing and the profit that it is producing, then a vendors shirt can be lost without knowing it.

DMCA?    Do you own all of those images?

I do assessments of existing articles by looking at their traffic.  If they are pulling in very little traffic I look at their optimization and see if I can tweak them towards better keywords.   I also look at traffic growth over time.  For my sites a new article might not start drawing representative traffic until it has been on the site for at least a year.

Adding to Kristina's comment.   If you have an informational page you can often rank in the local SERPs with no mention of any geographic location.   I have lots of informational pages about products and services.  Many of them rank on the first page of Google across the United States and many countries.

To do this you must write kickass content for noobs on the topic of "psychic readings".  I am talking about several articles that are the best for their topic that exist on the web, better than anyone anywhere.  If you are willing to do that, and can do that ("can do it" and "willing to do it" are very different things), it is possible to get it on the first page of Google.  If you happen to also offer that product or service, you can run house ads on that page that direct visitors to your sales pages.

Often, the competition is not as steep as you expect.  People who sell stuff are so focused on promoting sales pages that they totally ignore writing content that is so basic that a noob would want to read it and be able to understand it.   They are focused on sell sell sell.  And, Google, like a good search engine, will often mix informative content onto a page full of sales, just so people who are simply curious can learn about that topic.

So, I might write a dozen or two articles like these and post them on my site....

What to expect from you first psychic reading.....

Are psychic readings bogus?....

How can a psychic give accurate readings?...

How to know if my psychic is giving me a good reading?  ....

Then, after I have a great library of articles about psychic readings, I would make a category page that contains "the first article that anyone consulting a psychic should read".  That article will occupy the left column of that page.  The right column of that page would link out to all of the general "psychic readings" articles that I have along with some of the best that are out on the web - even if they are on my competitors websites.

No guarantees on this, but if you write all of these articles and do a fantastic job they should pull in some visitors and give you one of the most awesome libraries on the web.  I have ranked for some really difficult queries using this approach.  It takes a lot of work, you got to be patent before you see results, but if you can bust into the national or English language or global search results the traffic can be awesome.

Good luck if you try this.

It is best to have a domain that anybody who ever has business with you can type in your domain without thinking or guessing... at the same time you don't want to force them to type the Gettysburg Address.

RJRNabisco.com did what you are talking about, but that is an extremely well known company and the company name was created by a merger and they didn't want to divorce Nabisco and they probably didn't want the word "tobacco" stinking up their name.

Twenty-three letters is pretty long and would look like this one...  thisdomainistoodamnlong.com.

So, if it was my company, I would go with something like toolong.com damnlong.com if those were word combinations that people use to refer to my company currently.  Whatever, you want a domain that everybody will know instantly then register any variants that people might type in by mistake and redirect them to the homepage of your actual website.

I use to work at an organization where the IT staff thought that domains should be as short as possible, so they registered the name without any vowels because the exact name was owned by a plumber         Telling someone the domain on the telephone was a nightmare.  It was not unusual for the person listening to say huh?  what?  repeat that? because the domain was absolutely unexpected and meaningless like thsdmnstdmnlng.com

Yep.  People argue about this stuff.  The horses mouth even talks both ways.

So, if you hide your content behind tabs, you are gambling that Google is not going to respect that content today or tomorrow or at sometime in the future - even if they are doing differently now.

The only safe bet that I see is to display all of your content.  So, I have bet ALL of my chips on zero content hidden in tabs.  Zero content hidden in any way.

Showing all tabbed content at once is not an option.

Why not?

I don't use tabs for search engine reasons but I also don't use them to make sure that all of my content is out in the open for the visitor.  Some people don't know about tabs.   People who are old, have vision problems, are in a hurry, are not websavvy, are using a tiny screen, those people and many more have a good chance of missing your tabs.

I am getting all of my content out there for everyone especially Google.  Google has hated hidden content since 1998.  White text on white background might have been the first Google penalties.

**Which option is best? **

If you ask me, this is like one of those bad jokes, Door A or Door B and there is bad stuff behind both of them.  If you think you know how Google treats them today you might be wrong and if you think you know how they will treat them tomorrow there is even a bigger chance that you will be wrong.

Is there a better solution?

Display all text.  Search engines have always read it, probably always will read it.  Do different at your own risk.

This isn't an answer.  Its a rant.  So if you don't like rants, don't read it.

Google is always telling webmasters to "do this" and "do that".   Sometimes they dictate to webmasters because they want to "kick them up a notch" but sometimes they dictate to webmasters because Google is incompetent at certain things and they want webmasters to make-up for their inadequacies. 

Sometimes they tell webmasters to jump through this hoop or jump through that hoop and snatch the hoop away after you have left the ground.  Sometimes the hoop is invisible.

Google told webmasters not long ago about an "authorship" program that would associate content with specific authors and show your photo in the SERPs.   I never wanted my name on my article and am too old to display my photo in the SERPs but I did this stuff regardless.  You had to connect your articles to your Google Plus page to make all of this work.  After millions of authors did this Google decided that our photos were stinkin' up the SERPs, then they changed their minds and abandoned the idea completely.  I think it was just a ploy to get million of great authors to join Google Plus.

Several years ago Google also told authors that they should "write for Knol" and they would be rewarded with adsense.  I was going to put 1/2 of my time into writing "knols".  Good thing I didn't because Google abandoned that too.

Matt Cutts told me in the comments of a Moz blog post that I could sculpt pagerank with nofollow.  Lots of people started doing that and Google changed their mind about that and changed how it influenced pagerank flow and never told anybody about it until months later.

I could go on and on about Google dumping Reader, ignoring Feedburner and ton's of other stuff...  the bottom line is that if Google says you should do something, it doesn't mean that they actually use it or that it is going to help your rankings or even that it is safe.

I also believe that some things that Google promotes are absolutely dangerous to the health of your websites in the SERPs.  I would bet one month's pay with confidence that Google Consumer Surveys is dangerous for the health of your SERPs, but that is just an opinion and a reason why I am not making buckets of money running it on my websites.

And, in my opinion, Google Consumer Surveys is an excellent example that people on Silo A at Google don't even know that there are people working on something in Silo B that is totally contrary to their goals.    Mobile-friendly is a coding requirement and has nothing to do with your website being friendly to use on mobile.  It could really stink but they will tell everybody on the web that its friendly.

Bottom line, you should be careful about jumpin' through any hoop that Google says to jump.  They have some great stuff at Google but they don't talk to each other and things tend to disappear.

I'd use clicky.   I find it superior to GA.

website by pallasart a texas web design company in austin

I would keep it really really short.  Get the name of your company in there and leave it at that.  Why?

Pallasart Web Design is easy to read.

Pallasart Web Design is more memorable.

Pallasart Web Design, used on all of your designs, is a consistent branding message (I hope that is your domain name)

Pallasart Web Design is your brand name and Google doesn't like keyword-rich anchor text in my opinion.

People are going to click through based upon the quality of your work rather than where you are located (in ten years running many sites all of the people I have hired are very far from me because I hire based upon who does work that I respect).

People who click through this type of link are going to do so based upon how much they think you know about Google and I personally think that Google frowns on long keyword-rich anchors for an attribution link.

People are going to click through based upon how good you are at creating links that elicit clicks and I think that short, rather than keyword-rich is more effective at eliciting clicks.

A lot of people really dislike these types of links (search here for heated discussions about them) and they would allow Pallasart Web Design long before they would allow the long messages you provided as samples.  Some will not want any attribution links.

Some people are going to check your code and see if you have nofollow on the link and will be more likely to allow the link if it is nofollowed.

We don't take phone calls from customers, but we give very fast and detailed email support.  This allows us to answer questions in writing and by kicking that writing up a notch by refining it on subsequent questions we then have an article to post on the site.   Add a few photos or drawings and its ready to go.

No phone calls reduces the number of interruptions.  Then as your content library grows you get fewer and fewer questions and many of your email questions can be answered with a link to one or two articles.

Our email messages to customers look like the answers to questions that Patrick Delehanty posts in Moz Q&A - and I think people appreciate that.

I want to go write stuff now!

Awesome!

We launched a new small retail site and did that for about one year.  Two people, working at least 1/2 of our time.  Then we took a break for a year and saw good results.  Then we attacked again for about another year, producing more informative content than all of our retail competitors and the manufacturers combined.   Now we are not #1 for the root terms, but at about 4 and 5 behind Amazon, another major retailer and an large info site.  However, we own the turf, often with two or three pages at the top of the SERPs, for all of the secondary and tertiary money terms that I can think of.  Plus we hold good to great SERPs on tons and tons of the replacement part, fix it, and how to do it queries.  We continue to toss content at this site as we get new ideas from customer questions and our own enthusiastic use of the products.

"We have an expert in the field to write it and plenty of time."

"Although the main keyword is competitive, there are many many subkeywords that are a lot less competitive that would be answered in the article. It's tough to find good topics in this niche."

** salivatin' **

Attack!   Start posting detailed answers to all of the most frequestly asked questions that you get from customers, all of the things that they don't ask but should know, all of the things that will delight or surprise them, and even the things that will change their mind about purchasing ( returns suck).  Flood the SERPs with this stuff for the next six months, then evaluate, see what of these contents are pulling traffic or making conversions and if you see progress attsck for another six months.

we don't do the hard sell

If I read that on your website, I would be a lot more likely to call.  This is why I would be an email person.  I want to avoid this.

Unless we know the customer's financial history we can't offer fair and reasonable advice

If you tell me this before you start asking I am will be more comfortable about providing it.  You probably do this now.

Most of the articles on my website are between 500 and 2000 words plus two to ten photos, often with tabular data or line graphics.   I have experimented with splitting them into multiple pages and keeping everything on a single URL.  Here is my conclusion after doing this for about ten years....

If you have lots of direct traffic, as an example, CNN who has throngs of people coming directly to their site every day, AND you receive a minority of your traffic from search, then it might be a good idea to break your article up into multiple pages to capitalize on the many pageviews and ad revenue that comes with them.

However, if you rely on search for your traffic your nice article broken into ten pages of trivial length is not going to pull in as much traffic from search as one big long impressive page.  The big page will rank better because it is substantive, it will pull in more long tail traffic because it has more keyword diversity and it will impress the visitor who will more likely share it.  And, you will not have to worry about Panda slapping you because you have a site loaded with pages with trivial amounts of content.

ALL of my money is bet on the big article page.

I bet all of my money on visitor engagement years ago.  I don't think anybody believed me then, lots don't believe me now.   I have not done any real site promotion for a long time.

Throwing Out the Book on SEO!

I agree, especially with financial products.   I worry that they are going to want lots of personal information from me when I am only calling to ask a few questions.  Then they hit the hard sell.

So, if you can convey that you are not hard sell people and that you only ask personal information when the person is ready to give it then I might see that as a refreshing change and take a chance calling.

Yes, the links should come from your own website.

If you have a powerful site, creating sitewide links to several logical category pages within your product pages can be adequate.

If your site is new or not very strong yet then it may be best to grow the number of product pages in steps as your site is able to get them in the index and hold them in the index.  A weak site will probably not be able to get 5,000,000 pages indexed.  If your site is not powerful, attempting to do it usually results in a ranking decline on the original part of the site.

I think that there are a lot of people out there who have not gotten the "message" about nofollow.

Also, a lot of people, maybe including me, who believe in the "reverse psychology algo".

lol    Yes.   We sell hammers here.  I have some good ones and have close to seven decades of experience at swinging them.

I have opened my blogs to comments on a couple of occasions.  Each time weasels came in and posted their rubbish.  Some of them are idiots who leave comments that are obvious spam.  However, some are so skillful that you don't realize that they are spam with a shallow reading.

So, my decision was between not allowing links and closing the comments.  I closed the comments and am happy about it.

For the title tag, I used to feel that it was very important to load it up with keywords no matter what.

Today, I believe that I need just enough keywords to make my page relevant for a wide range of queries and then fill the rest with language that is extremely readable and that will elicit clicks.  I give the searcher a second blast of marketing in the description tag.

To me there is a big difference between "restaurant coupons" and "dining offers".  I think that the people who search for them have different expectations.  But, you know more about this than me.

My advice would be to use keywords that people are searching for and keywords that will elicit the clicks.  Because people may have different expectations when searching for "restaurant coupons" and "dining offers", I might have two separate pages that present the image of what I think the searcher expects to find.  The coupon page might have something to print, but the dining offers page might have a phone number to make a reservation and a "we will treat you right" theme.

So, think about your place of business and your customers and what you think will convert best for your profits.

Then experiment a bit.

Link deep into the site at many different internal hubs from high PR pages.  That forces spiders into the depths of the site and forces them to chew their way out through unindexed pages.  These links must remain in place permanently if you want the site to stay in the index, because if Google goes too long without spidering a page it will forget about it.

A mistake that people often make is to try to place five million pages on a PR3 website.  That will not work.  Not enough spiders coming in.  For a site like you are talking about you might need many dozen healthy PR6 links or hundreds of PR5 links and quite a bit of prayer.   For a site as deep as yours you might need to link to hubs at multiple depths because Google does budget the amount of crawl that they will perform.  The spiders will die down there.

We write our articles with lots of subheadings.  This allows our readers to quickly scan down the article for sections of interest.

We often include a TOC navigation similar to Wikipedia that floats left or right within a column of text.  From using CrazyEgg we know that LOTS of people click these links.

Also, in some articles that are about highly visual content, the top image on the page will include a matrix of thumbnail photos (think an article titled: Arizona Cactus Varieties ) with each thumbnail showing  a different type of cactus and a text link below it that the visitor clicks, the click takes him/her down the page to view associated content.  If you have colorful and interesting thumbnails these graphic TOC navigation will be clicked like mad.

Content republishing

Much of your content has been republished on other websites.  This is generating competition for you and may be costing you a significant amount of traffic.  You can see some of this here.  If a website a lot stronger than yours starts republishing your content you can expect them to outrank you in the SERPs for your own content.  If you can get some of these other sites to stop, use rel=canonical, or at least attribute your articles to your site, that will help.

Interlinking within your articles

I don't see you linking between your articles.  Within an article if there is a relevant tie to another story you should consider linking to it.  This will facilitate the flow of power between your pages.  It will also encourage your visitors to view multiple articles.  The more they see on your site that interests them the more they will like your site and share it, bookmark it, link to it, tweet about it, etc.

Also, at the bottom of each article feature other related articles on your own site.  Study the content ads distributed by Taboola, Outbrain, and other content networks to get ideas on how to elicit more pageviews.  When you have an interested visitor do everything that you can to get them onto another page.

Overall, I think that your site is poorly interlinked. Think about some category pages, some featured topic pages, an image gallery that links to relevant articles.  Get the linkjuice pumping through your site more vigorously.

Call your tribe into action

A site like yours with compelling stories certainly has a lot of supporters.  I think that you can do a better job of calling them into action, mobilizing them to help spread the word about your site and your cause.  Place obvious social share buttons on your site.  Create graphics or text boxes with attention getting titles that ask your visitors to spread the word, share on Facebook, email, link etc.   You have a little of this but you need to SHOUT ABOUT IT.

I don't do anything directly to share my content on social sites or build links.  My visitors do that for me.  Your fans are probably doing this already but if you tell them HOW YOU CAN HELP they will do even more.   Your content is far more compelling than mine.  Use the power of your stories to motivate sharing.  You can probably figure out numerous ways to do this. Brainstorm at your office.

Some other websites and some bloggers might post small banner ads of chicklet ads that link to stories on your website.  Offer them to your visitors, tell them this is how they can help call attention to the problems you address.  Your own audience  is your best linkbuilder.  Take advantage of it.  Tell them what they can do and some of them will do it.  That is how powerful your content can be.

Promote your website on your website

Your site has hundreds and hundreds of stories and very few visitors who land on your site know about them.  You could have topical navigation, or geographic navigation, or theme navigation.   Find out which stories on your site are the most popular the most compelling and feature them prominently. Which ones convert the best.  Do you know the path to conversion through your site.  Learn about these things and set up your site to promote your strongest content.  Make sure everyone knows about these most compelling stories.  If you have a story that lots of people are sharing, mentioning, linking to, do what is needed to make sure that everyone who lands on your site knows about it.  Play your strengths.

I like this plan.

Would I invest in this project?

If you are an outstanding writer who has enough  knowledge and experience about (for example) organic gardening that you can write 100 unique, substantive, enthusiastic, informative pages, each with unique images that perfectly illustrate the products then I might invest.  You need to have been doing this stuff for the past 10 years at least to be able to pull this off.   This is what defines "authority".  Content authority.

If you don't have that, then I would not invest.  Why?  There are lots of people who think that they can slap together 100 pages of content or hire someone to create them for $2500.  The web is littered with marginal content.  Also, the people who are searching for "best organic gardening tools" are going to immediately tell if your knowledge and experience are anything less than exemplary.   People looking for "the best" are usually an educated and discriminating group.  People looking for "cheap" would not be as discriminating but it would be hard to fool some of them too.

Today, a website that doesn't have excellent content doesn't have a good chance of success. Why?  If you don't have that content, nobody is going to share your content with their friends and say that you are awesome.  Amazon, Walmart, TrueValue, MotherEarth, Rodale's,  Organic Life, PlanetNatural, Burpee, USDA, CornellU are the gorilla retailers and expert content factories that you will be competing with.  The people who share content about this space will immediately detect content written for experts by a non-expert.

Rand has a good WhiteBoard Friday on making 10x content.  If you have not watched it, check it out.

https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday

I think that you have a great plan to target a class of keywords.  If you have the ability to pull it off then I might invest.

'Am I about to waste a tremendous amount of time?'

If I am interested in ranking well for a keyword, I don't look at those numbers.  Instead, I go straight to the search results and look at the quality of the content that is currently ranking for my keywords of interest.  If I am confident that I can beat their content then I attack.  Great authors with strong content area expertise should not look at those numbers.  If you can beat their content soundly (like Rand describes here) then you have a chance.   If you can't beat their content then is the time to evaluate.

Judging by the quality of the writing in your question, I think that you might have a shot at it.  You say that you have an extremely thorough "guide".  Does that mean you have hundreds of pages about hundreds of topics that speak to how to launch a business?  Is it clearly written for the average person?  Is it unique content that you own, found nowhere else on the web?  Do you have it on the web with all of the pages optimized, each for specific queries?  If you have that do you plan to  continue writing for this topic, on this site, into the foreseeable future (meaning at least a few years)?   Is this site already pulling in a little traffic?

If you have a confident "yes" answer for all of those questions, then my advice would be... Forget about this keyword.  Look at the analytics for your website and identify the pages that are pulling in traffic and producing income from adsense.  Identify the keywords of these pages.  Now you see what's working.  You have discovered a vein of gold.  Mine it 'til it plays out.  Instead of spending your time building links, find more veins.  Mine them.  If you are producing better content than what is out there I would keep attacking it.  As long as your traffic and income are growing month over month keep at it.

Instead of launching a massive linkbuilding campaign I would launch a massive quality content campaign.

That is what I would do.  I am sure that plenty of people will disagree.  Most of those people have never been able to answer a confident "YES!" to the questions posed above and kept attacking the content.

I'm concerned that I'll need to have some kind of in-post navigation

Do not be concerned about this if you decide to use them.  From my experience these are very powerful on-page optimization, second only to the title tag in their power.   Wikipedia uses it.  Check it out there if you have not noticed.  Kickass.

When you have content of various kinds on your website it can pull in a lot of traffic from outside of your geographic service areas.  If you want to measure how much of this is "local" traffic and monetize the "non-local" traffic I would suggest using Google's DFP ad server.

You can set it up on your pages to identify traffic from INSIDE of your geographic area and show those visitors your house ads.  Visitors OUTSIDE of your geographic area - who are not candidates for purchasing your service will be shown adsense ads or ads from some other network.

After you have done this the reports available through Google's DFP ad server will let you know the amount of your traffic that is local, the number that clicked through to your sales pages, the amount that is beyond your geographic area, and the amount of bonus income that you earned from people in New Jersey or some other location where your service is irrelevant.

Steep learning curve here, but over the next months and years you can earn a load of dough from people who will never spend a penny with you.

If you are really smart, you can set up DFP to display ads for colleagues who own businesses in other parts of the country.  They should be willing to pay premium prices for impressions made by people who live in their service area.

We had a problem like this starting a couple months ago.  We installed Google Custom Search on a site with the results to be displayed on the same page.  Now when you visit any page with the search box a hash and a few rubbish characters follow the URL.

So far, no ranking problems have been seen and no errors are showing in webmaster tools.

Andy's suggestion of rel=canonical is a good one.  We should do that on our sites.

I agree. If you still have two weeks of work with them, they can use that to take the links down.

These are good rules.  I think that the site owner also needs to get some basic understanding of SEO to evaluate proposals of work that will be done.  In addition, the site owner should get advice about proposals from third parties if he/she does not fully understand the work being done or what search engines expect.  Even when I work on my own sites, I often get paid consultations from people who have more experience, just asking them... "Do you think that this will work?  Is there a better way?"

I get so many companies contact me but so nervous as to who is reputable.

Most of the work on my websites is done by me or a long time employee.  However, most months I receive SEO, programming, design, usability consultations or contract work from an outside person or company.  For the last ten years, all of this work has been done by people I have gotten to know by reading the free advice that they give in forums like Moz Q&A.  In all of that time I have not been disappointed because I have been able to observe their responses on a wide variety of questions.

I would be very hesitant to hire a person or company who contacts me directly.  I get lots of these messages and phone calls for each of my sites and most of them are not offering a service that I would use.

So, if I had a new site for which I needed help, I would post lots of questions here.  See who responds, and the quality of their responses.  I would also read lots of responses from people who answer the questions of others.  Then after I see someone who offers good advice on the topics where I need help, I would send them a message asking if they are available.

I am not posting this because I am looking for work.  I only work on my own websites.  I am just saying how I find the people who do this work for me.  There are a lot of people who post on Moz Q&A who I have gotten to know by reading their posts and who I would trust to work on my websites.

If I was your accountant, I would kick you out.

These are suggestions only because everyone has a different style of doing business.  These suggestions are aggressive.

If you want the client to call you on the phone, the phone number is your "call to action".  So, place it on the website where EVERYONE will see it.

The header of the site in bold font with "Call us" or "Free consultation" or whatever language you think will elicit calls. Don't underestimate the power of those two or three words that accompany the phone number.  Your goal is to have the client call YOU and call you NOW.  Communicate that you are available and willing to talk.  You like to talk photography and weddings, etc.

Display your phone number in many locations.  Place it in equally bold font in your footer because some people look down there for contact information.

Include the phone number in bold font in article text where you describe your service.  Include it at the bottom of every article that is written for the benefit of the client. Precede it with welcoming words.   Write lots of these articles because people who contemplate important decisions often devour every scrap of information that you reveal about yourself.

Place the phone number it in the captions of your photos because anyone who reads the captions has an interest that has been triggered.

Some people procrastinate making phone calls.  Speak to them if you want to be their photographer.

In a crowded industry like photography some people don't want to call every service provider.  Instead they are browsing to find just two or three to call.   Speak to them if you want to be their photographer.

There will be people who want to email.  Talk to other photographers and see if their clients call or email.  You can include a "contact  us" in your persistent navigation.  When people click to that page they will see your phone number, your email address, your studio address.  You can include a form if you want.  These forms don't work on many websites so people don't trust them as having delivered the mail.  I don't trust them and just grab the email address from the code and compose a message in my email client instead of typing a big message in a tiny little window that often has length limits that are unannounced.

In the product areas where I sell, I doubt that anyone uses the word "retail" when typing a query.   A few people who are resellers or who want to be large quantities will search with "wholesale" or "bulk" in the query.   So, I do not feel a need to do special optimization for the retail buyer.

Information that would help me make the decision on adding "wholesale" or "bulk" to a title tag are....

A) How are people searching?  You can get some information on this from the limited number of keywords that show up in your Google Analytics reports, or whatever other analytics you use.   Also, some information can be obtained from word tracker.  How people speak to you when they call on the phone can be useful.

B) How are your competitors optimized?  If none of them are optimized with "wholesale" in their title tags then you can probably get away with not including it in the title  but adding it to the description and making it obvious on the page.

C) Laws in the state or country where you are selling.  In some jurisdictions there are rules for using "wholesale" in your advertising.

I sell some items that are used in crafts and my buyers are split between people who buy an ounce and those who buy a hundred pounds or more at a time.  There are only a couple  genuine "wholesalers" in the USA who refuse to sell to any person who is not a retailer.  To buy from them you must spend a lot more than my typical customer would ever want. Thankfully, they have not optimized their site with the word wholesale.

So, I don't optimize as "wholesale".  Anyone who searches for  my items with "wholesale" in their query will find no other websites that are a genuine matche.  I simply optimize my pages for the material that is being sold.

My pricing to everyone is "retail" but if you buy a lot you pay a much lower price per pound.   I sell to anyone without regard to the size of their order or their status as "consumer" or "retailer" or "manufacturer"  at the same prices.    These materials are sold on my site in small quantities that the typical consumer would buy and in bulk quantities that would only be purchased by resellers or manufacturers.

The only problem that I have with this are people who see the prices on my site and think that I have secret prices for resellers, schools, churches, manufacturers, etc.  I simply tell them that we sell to everyone at the prices published on my site.  There are also the "hagglers" who think that published prices have no meaning or don't apply to them.  I don't haggle because it is a game that cuts profits and wastes time.

I agree.  Concentrate on it.  Moving it up just a few positions will be a big improvement in traffic.  Then after you are in great positions for your most important keywords, launch one of the new domains and put all of your work into it.

Most people look at new domains as "opportunities".    I look at them as "taking your eye off of the ball".

If your current websites are kicking everyone's butt everywhere that is the best time to start another domain.  If your current website is not dominating everything everywhere then that is the worst time to start a new domain.

So, if you are not dominating your niche, you would be better off putting all of this work into your current main site and moving it from position #5 to position #3.  That will do more to pull in traffic and show off your work than building a couple of outhouses.

That means all products will have the same image, description and title across all stores. What would be the best practice to avoid getting stores penalized for duplicate content?

You will be penalized for duplicate content if you do this.  At some point in the future it will happen.  Tellin' you right now this plan is doomed long term.

So, you can wait for it to happen or you can do a proper job from the start and create unique, substantive content for each website.

If you remove a redirect for a URL and a link to that URL on another website still points to that old URL,  then any visitors who click that link will hit a 404 page.  My old redirects will still be there when I attend my funeral.   The lesson to learn is don't change your URLs unless absolutely necessary.

<rant>I see the same sites appearing in my "Crawl Errors" report in Google Webmaster Tools.  The noob coders who publish these sites muck up the URLs and they produce 404 errors.</rant>

It is really hard to give advice like this because "Perfect SEO Titles" and descriptions and headers depend upon what website you are going to publish them on.

If you have a big, strong, kickass website you can put very little effort into this and beat everybody around.  Just slap up  "Discount Coupon Codes for Amazon" and you will beat everybody for all permutations of the keywords.  You will rake in almost everything.

Now if you have a new, weak, tiny site then you will have to be like a mouse in the elephant cage at the circus.  He has to target one tiny little morsel of food on the floor, wait until none of the elephants are looking, dash out, grab it, run back to his hiding place, and pray that he doesn't get stepped on the entire time.

So, your title tags have to be customized to the strength of your site compared to your competitors and the query that you are targeting.  Coupons is a very competitive niche so you will have to be very smart.

If you have a new, weak, tiny site, your goal should be to find queries that are used but that noone else is targeting.  You gotta be a really smart and fast mouse.  For that reason, researching what people might query and finding those that are unguarded is everything.   And, generic advice has no value.

At any given time Google has lots of different indexes.   They are always testing different algos and using different vintages of data.  All of this happens on thousands of severs at multiple data centers worldwide.   So, if your pages are relatively new then they might be in and out of the the search results that you see depending upon which of the many servers responds to your query.  The newer the pages, the more volatile they might be.  The weaker your website, the longer it will take them to stabilize in the search results.

That is a partial answer to your question.   (Read the book "In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives" by Steven Levy.  Very interesting, helps you be a better SEO because you will understand how they think and work a little better.)

I made a lot of car accident lawyer city pages.  They probably weren't as unique as they should have been.

If you did this Google will probably index them and start displaying all of them.  Then, if Google decides that some of these pages are not as unique as they would like, some of them will be filtered from the search results.  To find out of this is happening go to the very end of the search results and on the last page you might see something like.....

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 10 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

If your page can be found in the "repeat the search.... " then you will know that Google thinks that the page is too similar to other pages on the web (on your site or on other sites) and they have filtered your page from the search results.

If you have lots of these pages then google might think that you have a low quality website and their Panda algo will get you.  That will demote the rankings of almost all of your pages for almost all of their relevant queries and your traffic will drop suddenly.

If you really make them mad with this stuff they might consider your site to be even lower  than low quality - meaning spam - and deindex lots of your pages or your entire site.

So, that is the stuff that can happen.  Don't publish a lot of cookie cutter pages or just change place names and insert synonyms.  Google has been slapping people for that stuff for at least ten years.

Also see here and here for good responses to similar questions asked by you and answered by Patrick Delehanty.

I'd like a robot that knows how to fetch coffee, go to the mailbox, take my car for inspection and bring it back.

"This ... device will include cameras for eyes and microphones in its ears. It may even have facial and voice recognition abilities so that commands and interactions can be adjusted, based on user permissions.  Some versions may include one or more motors, actuators, servos, wheels, and so on to allow the client device to move."

(ignore the "creepy" part)

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/google-creepy-teddy/

If you leave them up, Google's Panda algo might decide that your site is low quality and demote all of your rankings.

I would remove them or noindex them.

Great, maybe you can get your partners to write this stuff.

Landscapers, architects, and construction companies who want search visibility in multiple cities write articles with photos and descriptions of previous work that they have done in those cities.  Companies who have stores, beauty salons, and restaurants in multiple communities have photos of their places of business with nice descriptions of what they do, the people they serve and the professionals who work there.   If you are unable to do these things they you really have no business presence in these areas and Google sets a high bar to block out spam.