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Can you say what niche your website caters to? What kind of content is your website producing that others might be interesting in sharing -- so that you naturally acquire backlinks? Are there any trade organizations in your industry you could leverage? I know that you say your audience is not the most active online. Well, where are they spending their time online when they do log on?

Hi there - The SEOmoz Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo might be a useful starting point for you.  Chapter 7 focuses on linkbuilding. You mentioned local SEO. Do you have questions specific to local search?

If I were to put a site map at the bottom of a page, I would not list every single page but only the most important category and page links, along with the links required for legal purposes. You don't want footer links to drain your page of link juice, nor overwhelm your page design. What's more, placing a ton of the same links on every single page of a site is definitely considered spammy these days.

For news sites, yes, the lead story should be the first thing a user sees. For most other sites, though, a few links in a well-designed top nav bar should be placed near the top of the page or directly underneath a branded banner.

So how would you block spiders from crawling social media sharing icons? Or is there another workaround?

Will having 401s on a site negatively impact rankings? (e.g. 401s thrown from a social media sharing icon)