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I'm looking for a way to track backlinks that are made and make sure that they don't disappear.  Is there a way in SEO Moz to have it check the backlinks that it has identified every month to make sure they're still there, or do you have to do it manually by download the list every month and comparing them?

Just to follow up on this.  the meta tag for this is

If you exported a document with all the url's of your domain, do you think this spreadsheet program would work?  I fooled with it a little, but couldn't get the function to work.  There's a Curl call you could try if you're a programmer

http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/google_plus_one_button_seo_count_api/

Edit:  Since I'm a programmer, I thought I'd see if I could make it work.  Here's a really quick application of it.

http://www.touchoftechnology.com/google-plus-1-counter-for-list-of-urls/

Also keep in mind that SEO is not an exact science.  There are methods that should produce results, but there are no guarantees that the company can rank your for the keywords you want at the price you're willing to pay.  Theoretically, given the budget, any company can rank for any keyword they want, but you probably aren't going to be happy with the price tag.  They're a company too, so the more work it's going to take them to rank you, the more it's going to cost.

Adding Canonical links certainly wouldn't hurt.  I don't think it'll help you though.  It may see them as duplicates because there is so much of the page that is the same.  Is it possible for you to throw in a paragraph description about the scholarship for each one?  There isn't much for a robot to compare when 80% of the page is the same and just a few fields are changed.

Oh yes,  I realize the call only gets it for that specific domain.  The thing you could could do is download a full list of the URL's in your domain, and paste them into the textbox.  Then put that into Excel and run a sum on the count column.  Sorry if that didn't make sense.  If I get my site crawler operational, I may be able to implement a way to just put in the top domain and have it find all the other pages and tally them for you.  But as of now, the list is the best I can do.

for instance.

"http://www.apple.com/",13476

"http://www.apple.com/mac/",257

"http://www.apple.com/ipod/",134

The export tool from OSE should have all your pages listed.  Given it's not a huge domain, the tool should be able to handle it.

Let me know how you make out, if not, I'll have time tomorrow night or maybe Sunday to improve the functionality.

I have to say that a well posted comment with some meaning has driven traffic to my personal blog.  Every once and a while I'll see a strange referrer and it's due to a random blog comment I posted.  Has it made a huge impact?  Not really.  Could it be outsourced?  Probably, if done by a professional that will take the time to make the comment meaningful.  You won't find a cheap way to outsource a true comment though.

Where you installed the blog shouldn't matter as any content in the blog will be structured under the directory you installed it in.  I've run a few blogs out of sub directories with no issue.

If you're comparing your page speed from pre-blog to post-blog, chances are they'll be slower because of the nature of the blog.  Every widget/plugin slows down your loading time, as may a poorly designed theme.  Add the fact that you're using a database to serve your content, it slows down more, especially if you're on a shared hosting platform that has other sites doing the same thing.

As for your 404 error.  Is products.html a page that's outside of the blog directory?  If so, you have to hardcode the http://www.mysite.com in the href or the blog will auto append it's base directory on it.

If the comments above haven't swayed you from looking at density, SEO Quake has a plugin for Firefox that will analyze all the words on your page and give you density for each word and each phrase.  It may bring to light some phrases you weren't meaning to target, or show you a word you have much too high a density of by mistake.

SEO is linked to your domain name, not the IP address.  Think of these two scenarios.

1:  You move your website hosting company.  Your website obviously will get a new IP.  Google has stated that this does not affect your SEO.

2:  You have your domain hosted on shared hosting.  There would then be thousands of sites with the same IP.  You clearly don't all share the same SEO values.

Just because you have WordPress running your blog, doesn't mean WordPress has access to edit the files of the main eCommerce site.  You can install a standalone WordPress blog in examples.com/blog and have regular HTML files serving example.com

You can also takes steps to secure your WordPress installation on top of this.

I saw a site that was redesigned and then became incredibly slow.  Their issue was that there were a number of widgets that loaded a bunch of different Javascript and css files.  There was also an issue where the site wouldn't load until all the images (and there were many dozen) on the page loaded.  I use Chrome's developer tools to see all the elements that are loaded on the page. It's very useful in determining what's taking the most time to load.

The canonical tags are definitely applicable to this situation once Google goes everything again and sorts it all out with the new tags.

Start with On-Page optimization - IE get your keywords into your content.  Then I would just start reading SEO blogs until you have enough understanding of what's going on to branch out from there.