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Keyword usage is highly important, how as the prior poster said keep it natural. I mean think about it, if your website is about Hotdog Manufacturing it would only make sense to have that phrase used frequently. The actual ratio of keyword vs total words does not have an exact formula, however if you just keep in mind natural You should be fine. If the phrase is scattered to heavily (keyword stuffing) then you could get penalized. Good luck!

Thank you Cyrus!  To answer the question of why I changed their domain name in the first place,

1. Original domain name had no relevance to the services they provide
2. The domain name was 23 characters long, which I feel is way too long and allows for 23 opportunities for a client to misspell the name when writing emails, accessing the website, ect....
3. The domain name was 7 syllables....by the time you told someone the address you where exhausted and the prospect was confused
4. They had virtually no web presence, so the switch was simple enough.  They had literally one link.  The site was under 10 pages, so again, not a huge undertaking.

Again, thank you so much for the feedback.  SEOmoz really has a great community!

This is just my opinion, but the fact that someone would have to cold call to find SEO clients throws up all kinds of red flags.  A talented SEO NEVER needs to cold call. In fact the problem is not finding new clients, the problem is having to pick and choose who you take on. Isnt the point of seo to bring in leads and clients? If your own seo skills are so poor that you have to cold call, then...well I am go out on a limb here, but get the he k out of our industry and giving real seo's a bad reputation.

In my experience keywords in the front are more powerful. Google algorytm takes into account the minute variances in a title. So for example if you sold cars in new york the titles "buy cars new york" "new york buy cars" "cars new york buy" would all have a different effect on rankings "typically"  . I know that was a severly rough example, but hopefully the general concept made sense...

I agree with alot of what has been said, but the two comments really ring true for are,

#1 All these low quality SEO's are creating a huge opportunity for high qualified SEO's

#2 Word of mouth. Word of mouth. Word of mouth.

Thanks for the posting. I do similar blog posts somewhat frequently myself..

I just tried Liquid Web...I was going to go with them, but twice I called and the voice connection was horrible and when I asked the sales rep to explain the benefits of going with liquid web as opposed to other providers, she almost acted annoyed...it was very uncomfortable...not a great way to enter into a business relationship....unfortunately they are scratched off the list of possibilities as a place to bring our rapidly growing web agencies client websites....

Trying Media Temple and your suggested Pair...thanks!

A really good seo gets more referals than they can handle!  So sick of low quality, unethical, high volume crappy seo scammers out there....AAARRRGGHHHHHH!!!!!

Ok, I feel much better now....

They are updating the Rankings tool so I believe we will not get reports until thw update is done. Its actually driving me nuts!  Its one of the main features I use....its been down for a while now...

Well I am going to also go with your suggestion, I am going to pick up some hosti g from Pair next. Thanks for all your input!

I think the best strategy would to achieve visibility in both Places listing and traditional organic. One without the other would simply be 50% less effective, atleast based on how Google is currently dispalying search results. Perhaps in the future there will be significantly more weight given to traditional organic results, or maybe places aill dominate...or some other form of search result placements will emerge. I think to have an all inclusive approach at this point would be a safe approach. Good luck with everything!

I spoke with a potential client yesterday and for legitimate reasons they have multiple domain names, all very closely related in name to each other pointing to one site. His main site. So for example this is how things look,

mainsiteva.com, mainsitedc.com, mainsitepa.com, mainsiteca.com, mainsitega.com, mainsitela.com ALL forward to mainsite.com

This is being done because they used to have different sites for different geographies. Will google look at this as some form of manipulation?

I think a blended approach would be best. I think a dispersion of 50% exact keyword and 50% variations, but when choosing the specific variations I would verify through any keyword tool that the variations you use have decent traffic.

As for the most important areas to place the anchor text I would say main nav, onpage sitemap and body of content in that order respectively.

Of course this is just my view...good luck with your project!