The role of an H1 influencing rankings has certainly diminished, but I would still say it's worth having a keyword in there.

What it sounds like to me is that you're designing your page around the user first, and SEO/H1s second and that's exactly how it should be.

Now, in theory, the higher up you can have the H1 tag the better - as search engine crawlers do crawl linearly from top to bottom - and it is has been said that the crawlers sometimes do not crawl the entire page. For that reason, you'd want it nearer the top as possible.

But I'd certainly not want to skew the flow of the site just to force an H1 tag to appear higher - certainly not in this day and age where the H1 is less of a ranking factor.  I'd be confident that by having it in there somewhere in the of your site is more than good enough.  If you want, visit the site that's linked in my profile - we actually use an H1 tag that's lower down the page as well and not had any worries over it thus far.

Hope this is some use to you!

If you're just changing the title tags, then no, you do not need to setup a 301 redirect. You can leave that URL as it is.

As for hops, I would say that anything more than 3 hops and the search engine is not likely to follow it any further.  Here's an article on the topic, complete with a Matt Cutts video on redirects, as well as specifically addressing the hop issue (it's at the bottom of the article).

Presuming that you're going to be linking to your website in the comment, I'd probably keep it limited to your own niche, but there's definitely room for a few comments from other industries.

If your comments are engaging, provide value to that blog's community and are not on blogs that are spammed to death, then you won't be doing any harm.  The key is to comment something of worth and to integrate yourself into the community.

I always think of blog commenting as a way of establishing a community presence and to raise unaided brand awareness.  Any subsequent link of page strength is an after-thought for me.

Generally, I'd say as original as you can make it.

But I'd definitely take on Doug's advice as well and see if you can incorporate your content into an article that directly serves each blog.  If you can accommodate it to their target audience, that would be fantastic.

Invariably, I often find it easier to write something completely new rather than rewrite something multiple times, so I think if you can take the general meat of your content and serve it specifically for each blog, I think you're going to see more than just SEO strength, but genuine, positive user engagement and probably traffic.

A dofollow link will pass the SEO strength, or "PageRank" of the page to the site that it links to. A nofollow link, in theory, will not do this.  That's the main difference between the two.

By that logic, you may assume that a nofollow link will not help you rank for a keyword, but I don't think this is completely the case.  Having a link to your site in any capacity may improve the "authoritativeness" of your site.  SEOMoz uses Page Authority and Domain Authority to measure this and, while not an official Google metric, it stands to say that if you have 2 identical sites, one has 5 nofollow links from newspapers and the other has none, Google may well think that the site with the links has more authority or trust and may treat it more favourably.  We all know how much Google loves to promote real brands.

As for seeing if a link is dofollow or nofollow, you can either inspect the element in the source code, or a convenient and hassle-free way to test is with the SEOMoz toolbar. That toolbar contains an option to highlight the links on the page - green links are dofollow and pink links are nofollow.  If you check previous posts on any website, you should be able to see a pattern of whether they allow for dofollow or nofollow links - but in the end, this is at the discretion of the webmaster.

Hope this helps!

Hi there

It will take a bit more time, but rewriting the content to be unique would be so, so worth it.

If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site. It won't think that you're offering as much worth to the other blog and subsequent referrals if you're regurgitating what has been said.

Now, the obvious exception to this rule are Press Releases through sites like PRWeb. This is a well-known anomaly in the industry (some say it passes juice, Matt Cutts tries to say it doesn't), but it's so far down the line now that it seems unlikely that Google is going to penalise your site for it.  The worse that would happen would be not passing any SEO value.

It is not safe to assume that this would be the case for sending your articles to these other blogs - it may very well penalise you.

By rewriting the content, you negate any risk of this and also ensure that the uniqueness will most likely pass the SEO benefits from the separate blogs.

To me, it's a matter of risk management, and all signs seem to point towards rewriting the content.  It's a bit of an annoyance, but a small price to pay considering the benefits.  It's also a great compliment to what you've written before, which has obviously proven to be very valuable, so congratulations on that!

If you can check through all the backlinks and can be sure that they're good quality links, I'd bop in a 301 redirect.

I look for two things when considering 301s: Traffic and live links.  Your client has both.

If she is serious about promoting the new site as the definitive website for her brand, then I'd put in the redirect.  For continuity's sake, you may want to make the new page similar to the old one, or carry the same brand messaging, but I think a 301 is much more preferential than a landing page.  It would pass on link strength and also not interrupt the user's journey.