Welcome to the Q&A Forum

From my experience as a publisher...  Most PR firms are spammers who wear a suit to work. 

Tread carefully because they can see you as a threat because there is obvious overlap. Some PR companies welcome a team approach, others certainly do not - guess it depends on who they are and how well defined everyone's roles are. It's obviously great news for the client if all can work together towards a common goal - i.e. their success. Our experience is about 50/50. Good luck

Sponsorship & donator opportunities are the best. Find relevant college clubs and ask if you could sponsor them in exchange for a link; I.e. throw $100 there way. Also, look for donations pages in your niche, and before donating, make sure you can get a link. Even if there aren't any links on the donators page, ask them anyways if they would give you a link in exchange for a donation. You can get really creative with this. Just find any organization that's relevant and wants support, then start asking away.

Yes, you are correct that certain kinds of call tracking and having different numbers out there online do dilute your NAP and you don't want it for your local rankings. That said, there are definitely services out there which do different types of tracking without giving different numbers. One I can across was m.Call. (Note: I know nothing about them except that they say their service avoids this.)

Would using rel=author be a good idea in this situation?

Thanks for the answer Kris! Regards, Ash

Yay!! Glad the answer was helpful. I was fearful as I was writing it that I wasn't as clearly conveying what I was trying to say as I should have been. lol - But you got me so that's good!!

In my opinion, if there is a measurable result it's probably going to come from the human factor as opposed to the technical/algorithmic. By human factor I mean actual organic patterns of behavior linked to see a result in both the paid and organic positions. I believe that people will 'trust' these more if they appear in both places, as they seem to be signals that are reinforcing each other. The organic result implies that this site is relevant and worthwhile. The paid result implies (rightly or wrongly) that this site is established and willing and able to pay for their position in the marketplace. The combination of these two factors, plus just the extra eyeball real estate of appearing twice on the same page, likely means you'll get more traffic. Keep in mind that this is just an opinion, and I haven't reviewed the article Simon Cullum helpfully linkedabove. The technical/algorithmic aspect I mention above is more ambiguous; essentially 'does Google give sites that pay for CPC greater consideration in organic rankings?'. As has been mentioned nobody knows, and if they did that is a giant lawsuit/loss of trust waiting to happen. Because of this actual measurable factors that would indicate Google is doing this are going to be very very thin on the ground.

Go forth and conquer!

Thanks Robert!

Greetings Champions! Sir Thomas is correct, Wikipedia is a non profit organization and can not help profiting companies in that manner. If you notice companies like Dell, and IBM have pages because of their historical significance. I also thought this would be awesome and tried it, with the same results even after a lengthy talk with a mod. Good luck on your quests for Page 1! Justin Smith

After further investigation I think in my particular case the first company to add a specific EAN code for a product appears to gain the upper hand. Some of the top ranking sites have no reviews and are not the best price by some degree. Since they also don't have Google Checkout and can't really have more fields entered for each product in their feeds, or be refreshing it more frequently, this would seem to be the likely answer.

Once a concept is proven to work, why not reuse it? #justsayin

You'll definitely lose the authority inherited by the current long domain name. Especially if shorter domain is a brand-new domain. That said, these days everything you put through Twitter (why I assume you're looking for the shorter domain) is auto-shortened by their service, which Googlebots read through.

I've just endorsed Gyi's answer, but would also like to recommend that you use at least 2 of Google's pre-set categories if possible and follow these up with custom categories of your own choosing. And do stick to that rule of describing what you are instead of what you do. Good luck!