I'll take domain mentions any day.

Here's an article on Moz...

https://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions

Lots of people make gifts to get their biz name on a brick, get their biz name on a plaque, get their biz name on a race car, get their biz name on the outfield wall, get their biz name on a huge sports arena - or a building or a law school.    So there is nothing wrong with giving a gift to the library and having your domain - the name of your biz - listed on a webpage.  If they charge you more to link it then its a paid link, if they don't charge you for the link its not paid.  You should make the gift for the purpose of doing good, not for the link.

Ask if the gift can be acknowledged on the website as "The staff at YourDomain.com"

Who knows, they might link it for you.

You can give to charities and use your domain name as the donor.  That will get you a domain mention, which some people believe to have value, but is safer than a link.

My feeling is that wysiwyg leads to code bloat and generally fewer optimization opportunities. I have no real evidence. Is there any reason not to use the wysiwyg editor?

If you are working really hard to make great content and a great website, then you want to be sure that your code is as good as you can make it.  When wysiwyg is used, you are trusting your SEO to a coder who many or may not know anything about SEO.

Because SEO is a competitive endeavor and because one screw-up in the code can be fatal, one must either check to be sure that the wysiwyg code is perfect of take control of the coding yourself.

I found a long time ago that I can only bet on myself for certain things.  My work isn't perfect, but my work on a bad day is often better than the work of many "professional service provders" on a good day.  So I bet on myself.

If this was my site, I would be fighting to keep the breadcrumbs.

Some people believe that it is very important to maintain 301 redirects for a long time.

If you have mydomain.com redirecting to mynewdomain.com and remove the redirects, then any links from xyz.com that point to mydomain.com will not go to the proper destination.  All of their clickthrough traffic will be lost.  And, if you remove the 301 you are letting the flow of ranking value to chance.  Will Google forget where those links are supposed to go five years from now.  (they might not be archiving this stuff as well as you think)  How about other search engines?  Or new search engines.

I have redirected domains a few times and all of those domains still have their redirects in place.  The cost of maintaining them is usually going to be very low compared to the possible losses.

All of my redirected domains will be in place when I go to my own funeral.  And, in the "urgent" section of my business continuity plan, my heirs are instructed to protect those old domains and redirects as if they were caches of gold.

I wouldn't add phone numbers in the meta description because I want people to click into my website - rather than see a number in the meta description, then dial.

Write your meta description to elicit the click.   Google knows when searchers click, they don't know when they dial.

Do everything possible to elicit the click... offer free phone consultations, free beer, anything to get the searcher into your website.     Just make sure that you deliver what you use to elicit the click.

I am confident that they are helpful.  In small markets, nothing more than these can put a website on the first page.   Iin large competitive markets, more will be needed.

This guy is a high brow.  Tell him to write content that will earn links from the resource pages of law school websites and that will beat everyone - if he has what it takes to pull it off.