LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService work.

Trading links with other quality sites in your niche is a great way to get links. Just make sure the sites you're linking to are high quality (not spammy, have pagerank, aren't using shady link tactics). A quick backlink check of the sites using OSE or Majestic is probably a good idea.

I usually like to put together a "Partners" or "Resources" page where I add all the links from people I trade with:

http://www.salsabythebay.com/resources/

Hopefully you can use the initial link exchange to begin a relationship with some of the other players in your niche, so you can collaborate on other projects too, like guest posting, interviews, etc.

An XML sitemap shouldn't override robots.txt. If you have Google Webmaster Tools setup, you will see warnings on the sitemaps page that pages being blocked by robots are being submitted.

Now, robots.txt does not prevent indexation, just crawling. So if the pages were indexed before they implemented robots.txt, they may continue to be indexed. Google will also display just the URL for pages that it's discovered, but can't crawl because of robots.txt.

It's really not necessary to auto generate a meta description. They have zero SEO value.

The only thing they are used for is the text that shows up in the search results. If you don't have a meta description set, Google will just pull the text from your site that it thinks it is most relevant. If you want to override that with a custom description, that's fine and can increase CTR, but this is something you would want to do manually, not auto generate it.

The meta description tag looks like this:

<meta < span="">name="description" content="The Description"></meta <>

The code that you posted is an Open Graph description tag, which is used by Facebook to determine what description to show when your content is shared on Facebook.

Query parameters can become indexed by Google and can lead to duplicate content. Just make sure that you are using the canonical tag in your header pointing to the non-query parameter page, that way Google will know to index the proper URL.

Bounce rate is a very misleading metric. If someone visits your site, and finds exactly what they're looking for, they'll be counted as a bounce. Even some of the best sites on the web like Google & Yelp can have high bounce rates, so I wouldn't worry too much about the number, since it is unlikely to impact your search rankings.

In other words, don't make people jump through hoops just so you can reduce some percentage that doesn't really matter in Google Analytics.

One thing you can do with PDFs, though, is to have people sign up for your e-mail newsletter before they can download them. That way you can get their contact information in exchange for your content.

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.