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Webby,

Here is some additional reading.  Website makeover without losing rankings

Oh, I see that it now stands for "professional web", not for the country of Palau.  Poor Palausians lost their TLD to a bunch of investors.

I wouldn't buy just for any SEO value a direct match .pw domain might have 'cause it won't have much. If you're buying it for your main site, because it matches your company name, you're still better off going with a dot com or dot net. unless, maybe, you live there--which apparently only about 21K people do.

It looks like a 307 redirect on a link that opens a new page. The 307 is a variation of the 302 temporary redirect. Not sure why they do it but I don't think it's helping them with anything.

John,

301 redirects are the appropriate way to transition content from one url to another if you are concerned about preserving the algorithmic footprint of the former page because it has the least impact on that footprint.  A link and a 301 pass approximately the same link juice but they're used in different ways.  The link goes from one existing page to another, while the 301 redirect is implemented at the server level to send all visitors requesting a particular page to a pre-selected alternate page.  Make sense?

A meta refresh?   What's the URL?

If you have an appropriate strategic vision for your blog's content and the guest  bloggers are helping you achieve that, it's good.  If their posts take your content in uncontrolled, undesired directions, it's it's bad.

Work out a strategic vision for your blog by coordinating what you want it to accomplish for you with how much time/resources you want to put towards it.  The narrower the better if your only putting up one post a week, or so. I'd suggest that, although Facebook advertising, SEO, and web design posts are certainly complementary, that your focus is  a bit broad for it to be able to gain traction as a destination for readers, or to build community, or to get elicit engagement in worthwhile amounts.

Narrowing down the focus of your blog to a single, supremely niche area of expertise will certainly limit  the audience it appeals to (which is why you want to be sure that you've worked out an appropriate strategic vision for the blog that coincides with your niche) but you'll get more engagement out of it and that engagement is ultimately what's going to provide the your site with what you were looking or out of you blog in the first place--some oomph for your domain and your brand.

So anyway, back to the guest blogger.  Once you engage with the community of bloggers in the micro-niche you ultimately decide on you'll have a clear understanding of the value their guest posts will bring to your site and a greater sense of responsibility to write even better guest posts for them.

And that brings us back full circle.

"Creating links in well-ranked directories using his specific category is still a SEO strategy even after all those penguins and pandas."

No, it's not.

Point is, he's not going to see any results from you doing "link building" from those directories. The experienced SEO shows disapproval of such a plan by not taking on such a project.

First thing I'd do if I were the client is ask you to take your links of all my pages.

Your decision on how many keywords to focus on at one time could depend one how much content your site already has, what time frames your business objectives call for, and how many woman-hours per week you have to put towards it.

Often, it is better to be spending money that you do have than money that you don't, which would lead you towards going after low-hanging fruit first (option 1) so that you're seeing the faster ROI that that can bring. Then prioritize the creation/optimization of content for the rest of the project in segments according to remaining business objectives or product/service profitability,

Sorry about that.

While setting rock-solid client expectations may be difficult for the experienced SEO and  the rookie alike, a client coming to you at just 45 days into a project looks like the expectations were more far more on the loosey-goosey side than anything close to solid. That tends to be a rookie mistake.

Also, someone holding out promise that the client is going to get any ROI whatsoever from "submitting to free directories, social bookmarking sites and also writing and submitting articles to free article websites. Since I only use free and non-paid websites" and then asking his peers to back him up on that could be seen as a rookie mistake--either that or the mistake of someone who has been away from the practice of SEO for a good many years.

There may be value in the domain diversity that they provide.  There's no need to put them on more than a page or two of the client's site.  The fact that they're in the footer reduces their value. the fact that they're on irrelevant websites reduces their value. That many web design firms hammer on the exact match anchor text may be the worst thing about most of them.

Be modest in how many you put on the client's site and diversify your anchor text and you'll be OK.

Sometimes, it's hard to know who may be more at fault: the client who's looking to get their SEO work done so inexpensively that they'll put faith in someone obviously new to the field to do their link building for them or the person who's new to the field that tells the client that they can accomplish the client's goals without knowing much at all about what should be getting done.

I'm with you on the getting annoyed part, blablabla, but you really have to bone up on your SEO skills before you can start dissin' the client for what they don't know.  You should take a few moments to fill out your profile, as well.

Have you made any changes to the site recently.  I see that about this time last year the home page was a very different looking.  It didn't have all that scrunched up text at the bottom like it's there for search engine reasons, not for visitor reasons.  It didn't have all those slow loading images on it that kill the load time.  It didn't have 75+ instances of  variations of "photograph" on the home page.  It looks like the homepage  title tag at that time  was only about 2x longer than it should be vs. the current one  that's about 4x too long.

There's probably a lot more issues than those, as well but I didn't go to any interior pages for fear they'd take as long as the home page to load.  Sorry, but it looks like someone had their way with your site who still had a few things to learn about SEO.

If your online business is being propped up by tons of spam links--I mean .edu link lists links---be aware that the crutch could be pulled out from under you at any time.  The likelihood of it happening will grow over  time.  Time to get started on building some real brand equity.

Well, I'm no html expert but it looks like there should be another level of navigation that shows when you flyover an item in the grey dropdown and it's not coded correctly.

Server is IIS 7.0

Not sure I'm seeing what you're seeing Dana.  What I see looks OK at first glance.  Can you upload a screenshot?

Jason,

Think of how many individual blog posts you're going to need to write in 2013, 2014, and beyond (one hundred, two hundred, more?) and how much social outreach you'll have to accomplish over that time in order to build the blog into a really effective marketing tool for your company. Then you  gotta wonder how you can maintain interest and focus writing all those posts on the specific subject of "atlanta plumbing company" or "choosing an atlanta plumbing company".  On top of that, gotta wonder how many of those social profiles you reach out to week after week after week who are going to want to share your content on the specific subject of "atlanta plumbing company" or "choosing an atlanta plumbing company". And then you gotta wonder about the readers and how their interest will be maintained while you're writing only on the specific subject of "atlanta plumbing company" or "choosing an atlanta plumbing company".

I'd say that you're on the right path in thinking that your titles seem a bit spammy, but you've gotta get off the path and get on the highway.  On the highway, your blog can reach its greater potential--a vehicle that can reach and engage a community that is hungry for a wide variety of topics within your theme.

As someone here at SEOmoz is fond of saying, content needs to be exceptional, inspirational, unique, credible, fun, and beneficial to share in order to accomplish it's goal of being an effective marketing tool. I would start with that, when contemplating your titles, and then write your posts accordingly.