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When I'm doing keyword research, one of the first things I do is go on competitor websites and see if they have the meta keyword tag. If they do, then it instantly gives me access to all the keywords that they're targeting and allows me to work on beating them. Deleting your meta keyword tag prevents your competitors from doing this to you.
If you're a newbie, it might be worth using the on-page grader to make sure that all of your content is relevant. Make sure your content looks natural though and you do not over optimize or do any keyword stuffing. Once the content is sorted, you can get started on more advanced stuff.
You mention mistakes that you have made, if you told us what they were then we could make recommendations for you.
However, there is a LOT to SEO and some of it takes a long time to explain. I would recommend reading the beginners guide to SEO http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
You could try Majestic SEO and see if they show up there.
However, you need to be very careful when buying used domains with existing back links. What are you planning to use it for? If it's simply to 301 to your main site then you could be looking a manual action straight down the barrel. If you are planning on using it as your primary site, be careful that it doesn't already have a penalty.
Instead of who the links were from, have a look at what niche the old website served. If it is relevant, then you will have links from relevant websites and you might also inherit some relevant and diverse anchor text which will help. Use archive.org to have a look.
You can demote sitelinks so that they are less likely to appear but Google displays the pages that it considers to be most relevant to the searcher. Use the Mozbar to have a look at what the PA of the pages displayed are compared to the ones you want to display. You may need to have a look at your internal linking structure to improve the authority of the pages you want to display.
The general rule of using HTML for everything is one that I would follow. If you're unsure if something is crawlable, try downloading the web developer plugin for chrome http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/. Then disable javascript and plugins and refresh the page. Any content that can't be seen then probably won't be seen by search engines either.
Due to the management software used for a lot of our websites, the URLs for specific pages appears as:
brand.com/page/pagename/number
I want to add slug URLs so that they appear as:
First of all, do you think this is an effective use of my time and will it significantly benefit SEO in the long run. Secondly, these pages have developed a decent PA over time and I don't want to lose that. Will adding 301s for all the renamed pages be enough to not have a negative effect?
You need to think about why the website was performing well before the penalty. If it was spammy artificial links that were boosting your site, then removing the penalty means that they no longer help you. Therefore, your website is receiving considerably less link juice than before.
You may need to face facts that your link building efforts will probably need to start again from scratch.
I just typed cache:www.hotvsnot.com and got a blank screen. When I looked at the code, I got information about www.hotvsnot.us and a small amount of content about adult themes. Definitely something fishy going on there.
What about having a subtle call to action in there?
What you have written is fine, but it might be worth having a play around to see what works best. Maybe get 2 pages with similar performance in search, use one descriptive meta description like you already have and one with a call to action along the lines of "visit our website to find out about...". Then simply see which has the better click through rate.