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That isn't always a bad idea. I would just say to make sure you are dealing with trusted sites before trading for links. All links are not created equal. Too many untrusted links reflect poorly on your site, regardless of how they are built!

That would be my guess too. That is strange...

I was considering giving them a shot as well... I am a bit hesitant to invest in a static resource when SEOmoz has such a great, constantly evolving "database" of knowledge right on the site. The problem with SEO books and videos is they are time sensitive in a very fluid industry. I'll probably still give them a go (because I love SEOmoz) but I think staying up to date with all of the content on here is a sufficient way to stay informed. Hope this helps!

In Google places as well as on Adwords you can select your geographic area. As far as keywords go you can target multiple cities with keywords on the site (option 2) and through the anchor text on links. I have seen this work just fine on several auto websites - something I know a bit about.

There is a lot to this question. I think the way you are doing titles now is probably great for increasing the click through, mostly because they are in context. I would venture to guess you may be able to get more impressions by changing this up, but I always recommend quality over quantity. This being said I have NO IDEA what your traffic goals/stats look like. Good Luck!

Read the SEOmoz beginners guide. It's a great resource that can serve as a sort of how to/check list of activities to develop a good SEO foundation.

Sometimes common sense should prevail over the KW search volume tool. I've run in to local search terms I KNOW people are searching but aren't being registered.

I try not to take that into account when choosing keywords to optimize for organic. The competition may correlate to organic efforts but you can't let that dictate your optimization. You have to optimize for what your audience/clients are searching for. IMO.

This is great advice. Also be sure to fill out your listing as completely as possible. Add max amount of tags, pics, vids, etc... Also make sure your description is concise and keyword optimized (not stuffed).

Great content can get some good attention through social bookmarking. As you probably know, most of the popular bookmarking services are no-follow until a link attains a certain level of "popularity".

I'm pretty sure I recently saw that exact match domains were losing ground in SERPS. Cutts has openly said the value assigned to them is being diminished in the algorithm.

It is kind of weird manually giving yourself the thumb.

I'm not sure of any but would really like to find one, however by adding a geographic modifier you can get a good idea. Unless you are really swinging for the fences for a generic international KW, this is probably how people are searching anyway.

This would be ideal but only if you have the resources to effectively maintain that many social media accounts...

I agree. Here's a link: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html It looks a little shady but it actually does a decent job.

Life is easier with FF 3.6.

If the sites that are coming from are authoritative, relevant, and trusted... yes.

Actually a 301 (permanent) redirect does pass the "link juice" along to the new site. I've done it several times and it always works.

As you probably know SEOmoz had some hosting and server issues recently, and this came at a terrible time for me... We are in the middle of battling some duplicate content and crawl errors and need to get a fresh crawl of some sites to test things out before we are hit with the big one?

Before I get a million thumbs downs- I love and will continue to use SEOmoz, just need something to get me through this week ( or until Roger is back! )!

http://www.companyabc.com/blogtitle is definitely the way to go.

"Some subdomains (http://blog.companyabc.com) GET NO BENEFIT from the root domain they're on."

but...

"Subfolders( http://www.companyabc.com/blogtitle )  DO appear to receive all the benefits of the subdomain they're on and content/pages behave remarkably similarly no matter what subfolder under a given subdomain they're put in."

As stated by Rand himself!