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Very basically, the designs have to look great (modern look, clean code, responsive design is a bonus) and have a certain level of SEO-friendliness on launch.

I think it's very important to know which CMS they use, whether it be a 3rd party product or a custom solution, to determine how SEO capable and customizable it is.

It appears to be an editorially given link (good!), the alt text is not great, but it's good to have variety in your link profile.

For a site of that size and traffic volume I think you'll be fine with shared hosting - as long as you choose a reputable, quality host - which can be difficult when it comes to choosing a shared hosting environment!

I hesitate to recommend specific hosting companies because I've had both good and bad experiences with a number of hosts. Do your research and find a host with great support, reputation and standards.

Also, in regards to changing hosts, I wouldn't worry about the IP address implications too much. As long as you move to a reputable host you should be fine.

The non www to www is often used to consolidate links, if you had external links pointing to both versions of your domain. Without being able to inspect your site, specifically if you have an issue with links pointing to each version of the domain, it's hard to say how much of an impact it will have. Still a best practice to put in place to avoid the issue though.

I think you should implement meta noindex to prevent duplicate content issues.

"Create up to 100 personas with dozens of social accounts each."

"It's the software with the broadest coverage: up to 100 Twitter accounts, up to 100 Facebook and Google+ profiles, thousands of forum and blog accounts"

"Make one-click bulk announcements to all social sites"

If it looks, sounds and smells like spam...

It shouldn't make a massive difference, but...

Dashes are typically treated as separators

Underscores are typically joined

Right from the horses mouth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQcSFsQyct8

Quick update, the Adwords reports (Ads > Adwords etc) seem to be accurate, exact match api does not seem to affect them, so that is a positive.

I am concerned that access has only been granted throughout December, I hesitate that if it is taken away again we're back at square one. We're continuing to work on something in-house at the moment.

I'm also curios what effect the exact match data has on the Adwords reports, I'll have to test this myself. I can't imagine that if it only included exact match data in those reports, that it would be very useful at all.

Interesting, thanks for following up. Just found this blog post after seeing your comment:

http://raventools.com/blog/raven-restores-google-adwords-management-reporting/

Agreed, building authority on one site trumps trying to work on multiple - otherwise you are doubling your efforts and splitting your results.

It may have to do with the size of the index is tool is reporting from - obviously Google has a much larger index of the web and therefor can see more links.

This really is a questions for the SEOmoz team - I actually filed a private question (using our company pro account) re an estimate for when the Keyword Difficulty Tool will be back in action, I'm yet to hear a reply though. Will let you know when I do.

Everyone is going to have their own personal fave's, but top 3 are:

Raven Tools for an all-on one interface (un till last week anyway) still nice for streamlining reporting

BuzzStream for outreach prospecting and management

SEOmoz for crawl / on-site issues

(obviously Google's suite of Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Adwords, Insights & Alerts go without saying!)

Now that it's all the rage, i believe there will be an algorithm update specifically to identify low quality guest blogging links.

Google doesn't have a cert but the two providers I'd recommend would be:

Market Motive: Conversion Optimization Training and Certification

Marketing Experiments Landing Page Optimization course

Appreciate the input, interesting that their ppc offering outperforms Adwords in that instance/niche. I guess that is a pretty good fit for that particular site, something to keep in mind, for sure.

1. You'll need to have goal tracking and/or e-commerce tracking enabled in Google Analytics

2. Create URLs with tracking parameters to define source / medium / campaign etc, see:

http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867

If yes, is it because you believe it is still worth the cost for the link from this particular directory due to the prohibitive costs which deter low quality sites, it's review process,  the high DA, or other?

If you no longer submit to it, why?