Tables render slightly slower than divs, but it's not the end of the world. In general, you should avoid tables unless you're working with actual tabular data, but if tables make your life easier they're not going to have much impact on SEO, if any.

LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService work.

Google can easily identify navigational elements that appear on every page, and will ignore those for the purposes of identifying duplicate content. You don't need to be worried about your navigation being flagged as duplicate content, that's a standard feature of most websites.

That being said, you can be penalized for having lots of pages with little or no content (Panda). You'll want to make sure all the pages on your site provide some kind of actual value.

Well, Google isn't going to punish you for owning 4 different websites, it's perfectly fine to own multiple web properties that drive traffic to your business.  In fact, you're diversifying your risk by having multiple sites, since if one drops in rankings, you still have 3 others.

If the other sites are spammy, why would you want that content on your main site anyway?  Just include links from the 3 other sites, and point them all to your flagship site. That way your main site still gets the SEO boost, and you can build it out however you want, while you don't lose traffic from the other 3 sites.

Links in the footer carry very little link value, so I wouldn't add top category links to the footer just for SEO purposes. Looks at it more from a design/user experience perspective. If having the links in the footer makes navigation easier, then go for it.

As with anything else, the best thing to do is to test it. Install a click tracker such a CrazyEgg or ClickTale and see how people actually navigate the site. Test having the links in the footer vs removing them, and see if it affects usability, conversions rates, or SEO performance. Then keep the links that work the best.

DMOZ, BOTW, and Yahoo are really the only directories worth submitting to, plus maybe a couple of niche specific directories and local directories. That's like maybe a dozen directories tops.

As long as you keep directory submissions to a minimum, it's not going to get you penalized, so there is no need to worry about "ratios" or anything like that, although you may want to vary your anchor text or stick to your brand name.

The bigger issue is that directory links don't carry that much value, so you'll want to acquire relevant, high authority links outside of directories if you actually want to rank.

I think it's a good idea, and would be good social proof. Reciprocal linking is only a problem if Google thinks you are just exchanging links to manipulate your PageRank, which obviously isn't the case with news mentions.

If you absolutely don't want to link to them, at least create some testimonials using choice quotes from the news mentions. Or even better, create an image with the label "Featured On" or "As Seen On" and include the logos of all the places you've been featured.

"I like the concept that a directory is good only if you would still want the link if it passed no link juice."

Yeah, I agree that this statement is pretty naive. You shouldn't expect to get much traffic from Yahoo or DMOZ. People use these directories for the link juice and the credibility boost, not traffic. Since both directories editorially approve their links, they still carry a bit of weight (although exactly how much is up for debate).

If they don't have a physical address, they're not going to show up in Local Search (Craigslist/Angies List don't either).

Your best bet is to follow standard SEO practices and build good links & content. Create pages your site focused around each of the cities you are targeting, and make sure city name & zip code are in the URL, title, etc. Same thing for the individual business listings.

For on-page optimization, you can copy a lot of things Angies List is doing as far as SEO. For backlinks, get links from relevant local sites like local businesses, government websites, business associations, local news, etc.

Yes, I would go for the link. Since this is a product review, getting a relevant anchor text link is totally appropriate, but be sure to mix things up when approaching other sites to avoid being hit by Penguin.

When evaluating a link, don't worry too much about domain authority. Having a high domain authority is nice, but just because you have high domain authority doesn't mean you'll rank for your desired keywords, and just because a site has a high domain authority doesn't mean the link is valuable.

Here are some of the factors Google looks at when determining the value of a link:

• PageRank (higher is better)
• Relevance of the site to your site (relevant sites are better)
• Relevance of the content on the page (relevant content is better)
• Total number of links on the page (fewer is better)
• Anchor text of the link (relevant is better)

If a site meets a number of the criteria above, it's generally a good site to get a link from.