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Don't bother with it. Even if something has a short-term benefit, we know the general direction Google is going, and we know they will eventually be addressing any so-called loopholes.

Link-building is not dead -- but link-building as we know it is dead. Yes, you should strive to create quality content that others will share, but you should also seek out guest-posting opportunities from high-quality sites.

And don't underestimate the power of social media -- reddit in particular, depending on your niche/content.

I'm going to agree with all of what Adam Thompson said, less the social bookmarking part. Social links can be valuable as they can lead to an influx of traffic (depends on the content obviously). Reddit can be particularly powerful.

Yes, the tag is a little too long, but how long ago did you change it? It takes some time for Google to update the indexed page titles -- if you've changed it in the last week it probably just hasn't been re-crawled and updated yet.

Major kudos to Ryan!

You may have success by requesting removal of the cached version of the page using the URL removal tool; however, I'm assuming you aren't the site owner, and thus do not have access to the forum's URL removal tool.

It really depends on the site. If it's a highly trafficked forum, it is likely crawled frequently. You may see it updated within the week. If it's not, it make a month or so, unfortunately.

I hate to be a Bernie Bummer, but Content is King, and I don't recommend going after the cheapest solution when looking to produce it. While it's theoretically possible to find an "overseas" individual or company willing to produce content very cheaply, the chances are very good that the content itself will generally be low quality.

In a nutshell, if you're on a tight budget, content is not the area to apply restraints to.

The trackback links are generally nofollow, so PageRank isn't being passed. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Personally, I do not allow trackbacks on my WordPress sites.

It's listed right here in the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

"Building partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking."

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

The guidelines also mentioned "excessive link exchanges" -- so what's deemed excessive? This is definitely a gray area.

I would nofollow the links just to be safe.

Exactly -- take advantage of all the tools at your disposal. In this case, local results will be displayed more often than not. In a nutshell, you need to be setting up Google+ Local pages for the businesses you are working with rather than clinging onto the hope of competing with the big dogs for organic search position.

https://plus.google.com/local

If the site ranks well and there's any way to preserve the present URL structure, that would be your best bet. If that's not possible, 301 the old URLs to the new applicable pages.

You can do this via .htaccess like this:

301 redirect /old-permalink-here http://new-full-url-goes-here

If you're comfortable editing templates, you can use some variation of the following call in your template file to display the author bio:

If you're not, you can use this plugin and activate the feature for the archive pages using the settings panel:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-biographia/

Google should then automatically display the author bio as the meta description, even if the tag isn't explicitly defined.

Actually, a 301 redirect can be avoided here, provided you maintain the same page/URL structure. You can use this WordPress plugin to generate the custom .cfm page extension and retain your URL structure to avoid hurting your rankings:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-page-extensions/

It would be best to avoid a 301 redirect if possible.

Correct. The only way Google uses the meta keyword tag is in site search:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/

Subdomains are technically treated by Google as separate site. That doesn't mean that blogging won't help your main site, but the benefits would probably be higher if you hosted the blog in a subdirectory rather than a subdomain.

Here's Google's Matt Cutts on the topic:

“My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example. If you’re a newer webmaster or SEO, I’d recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you’ll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.”