Sure does.

If you install the Mozbar to your browser as well, it comes with an option to highlight follow and no-follow links on the page.

You can find Chrome and Firefox downloads for it here.

There's a couple of reasons why people might want to do this (and why I do with all my websites)

First of all, the page/site might be scraped and replicated by a bot, particularly if it's an authority domain.  Having your canonicals in place to begin with will help reduce the chance of your content being seen as duplicate, should a bot scrape your site.

Another reason would be if a website might generate any additional versions of the page through queries, eg www.domain.com/page.php?query2 - Having a self referring canonical will also tell Google that you want to rank the URL without any other queries, which can help prevent any of those queries appearing in the Google index and/or SERPs.

It's my understanding that the Googlebot can read this text, regardless of .css styles. You can actually check this yourself by putting in the page URL on this website (do a simple search for a free report). That browser fetches your page as the Googlebot would see it, so you can see if the content is read by Google or not.

Now, as for whether or not this might be deemed duplicate content, I don't think you have much to worry about as you have already taken necessary steps to prevent any penalty. Implementing the canonical tags that you have will tell Google that any duplicate content there is for a user reason and is not trying to game the system.

Provided those tags remain in place, I think you'll be fine. A problem may occur if you're building outbound links and hiding them using display=none or other .css styles. This is a big no-no and can get your site deindexed if Google finds it. Always worth bearing in mind for people on your team, but it looks like you've got everything under control!

Great answer above me, so I'd only add another resource to finding guest post opportunities.

Stoked SEO's link building query generator utilises all the different google search terms you can use to also find posting opportunities.

Don't forget to look at related blogs on sites like Technorati as well, and approach them through their contact forms.

It's pretty hard to give a 'right' amount here.

Of course, it's well documented that more content on a page has a strong correlation with improved rankings (and conversions).  To say that there is a golden threshold of characters, however, is impossible to say.

I'd rather bring up the point you make about stuffing.  That's probably the main thing to keep in mind when writing descriptions or content - don't make it look like you're gaming for a search engine, but keep it great for a user.  If you can use your keyword multiple times, that's great.  But, as you allude to, writing it for the sake of getting it on the page more often is a bad move.

If 160 words for a description is the absolute most you can say on a topic, without repeating yourself, then 160 is the right amount **in this case.  **Other times it might be more, and sometimes it might be even less; it really is dependent on the context.

You might be able to squeeze more content for a description by using things like an example of how a system/process works etc.  But I'd always remain focus on writing for a user, not a search engine, and to avoid stuffing where possible, as you rightly pointed out.