I don't believe local optimization will hurt your national rankings. I do a lot of local search and still rank fairly well for some of my keywords on a national level. I actually believe that additional listings will help your brand name. Which will most likely help your national ranking. And who doesn't want a few more links?

I would advise against over optimizing your current site with local keywords. Don't change what you currently have going. Just add to it. Add your physical address to your contact page and perhaps create an additional local optimized page.

P.S. Google already knows you have a location and they do check your domain registration.

Dreamweaver has a way of searching an entire website if you download the site to Dreamweaver. But webmaster tools should tell you where the links are being found on your site. They typically tell you which URL has the bad links.

Agreed.

There will be no SEO fall out due to hyphen.

It's a personal preference.

I like: footballsport.mysite.com

I don't like: football-sport.mysite.com

No hyphen just seems to be more common. Users may get confused only upon remembering the subdomain. "uh... I think there is a silent hyphen in that URL...??? Or was it no hyphen?"

So if you use football-sport.mysite.com then redirect footballsport.mysite.com to football-sport.mysite.com.

You shouldn't experience any problems with a hyphen in the domain name. Exact Match domains seem to rank better, but most likely not directly associated with the exact match but the domain history and content. Even with a hyphen you get a close match. I have seen hyphen domains rank just fine.

The only concern I would have is consistency within the domain name. You may throw of users by adding a hyphen to an unhyphenated domain. Personally I would opt against using the hyphen. People have learned to read through domain names at this point.

If you do go with the hyphen make sure you redirect the unhyphenated version to the hyphenated version.

Do feel the being more consistent is a ranking factor or just a reliable way to get views which helps your rankings?