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Both very good answers, the best answer is... it depends. A lot of it has to do with your product. Take SEOmoz. A good follower for them could be someone who has 3 followers but converts to a member or a follower with 1000 (quality) followers that has never visited the site but RT's SEOmoz.

This is not what you are going to want to hear but we had a similar problem... All we could do was delete and re-submit the pending pages. Ended up going quicker that way. Best of luck!

That shouldn't be the case. Local efforts should only help local, not necessarily hurt national. It also depends on if you and/or visitors are logged in at the time of search.

Be careful here. This can look very shady to users! Users first! (I swear I'm not a Google fanboy)

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 agree. Find a way to use no.1 and make it not spammy.

I like the Hybrid approach. Much more dynamic.

So true. Buy up all that you can afford as quickly as possible.

Raven Tools also has a feature that allows you to watch the rankings of keywords. You can also tag events in the results to see what effects certain efforts have on rankings... pretty nice.

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).

I see where you are coming from, but with each required click you lose users. There are definitely times where I would sacrifice some usability for the sake of traffic, but accessibility is everything.

You are right on the mark with the give and take of SEO and user experience.

Ha! I understood, that makes 2 people on the planet. Good share!

A. You have to create it with users in mind. It will also help the site's connectivity which is good for SEO. Above all else the site should be easy to navigate for users.

I'm sure it will be gamed too. Hard to say if that's enough to totally derail the thought though. What if it linked to your profile, a little harder to fake that?

That is a great point about the xml sitemap submission. Something so simple it's worth the extra effort.

Same thing here. I watch Bing and Yahoo but optimize for Google.

Click on traffic sources, which source is dropping? A certain engine? PPC? Are the same keywords driving traffic?

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=57160

That will be a better description than I could give. It will be in the upper right when you sign in to GA! Good Luck!

I tend to agree with Steve. I think eventually the degree to which these profiles contribute to the quality of your site will depend on how well the account is utilized. Sooner or later (sooner) this will begin to reflect poorly on them.

Set up a comparison date in GA and look at all of the traffic sources, is there one that has dropped significantly. This is such a broad question but that would be a good place to start looking.