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You're over analyzing this. If your home page is the only page that ranks, you have problems. My website has 28% of incoming visits to the home page. 71% is to the landing pages.

BUILD highly relevant landing pages and write KICK ASS content for those landing pages.

This to me looks spammy:  Austin Office Space For Lease | Austin Commercial Real Estate Properties | Retail Space For Rent | Austin Tenant Advisors

Obviously you are trying to keyword stuff.

I would write something clickable like this: Office Space for Rent in Austin for Commercial & Retail. Get Rates.

Here you go!

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/customer-experience/blog-tools/wordpress-integration.html

The blog network (link juice farming) is against Google's Editorial Guidelines. You never know if you'll get caught, but many people have.

Link juice farming on product/client specific blogs, or focus on content for each course niche on main site, that is the question?!

Focus on content for each course niche on the main site.

Blogs tend to have higher bounce rates, but if that is a concern you can filter out (EXCLUDE) your blog to see what you real conversion rate is in Google Analytics. As far as conversions, it will depend on the purpose of the blog: sales, leads, newsletter signups.

I would only have one blog because you can build a lot more authority with one blog than splitting up the blog five ways.

I think this looks WAY better than your other one. I'll give you a thumbs up because you're learning.

I think I'll be using this soon: http://www.bidsketch.com/

They are on SEOMOZ's Perks http://www.seomoz.org/pro-perks

This is a tough question because we don't know the business objectives of the company or site. If it's one company and you are trying to get local listing, why not just get a Google + page and verify all your local pages via the post card Google sends through the mail.

If all locations sell different things (car parts vs women shoes), new domain or sub-domain. But if your client is selling the same thing like Starbucks, then example.com/city.

I would personally create a page with schema.org markup for addresses and link them to /city

I wouldn't use that as a good SEO link building example. This looks like a little grey hat SEO. "If" I were the webmaster of that site, I would <nofollow>all of them so Google could see I wasn't trying to manipulate rankings. I wouldn't say it's bad, but it's definitely not something I would do. Besides, there's hardly any content. There's only about 9 sentences.</nofollow>

You have to stay updated on penguin.

You have a sitewide footer link pointing to http://www.prokellseo.com/

I wouldn't risk external link in the footer even if it is an exact match domain.

There are many factors that can make a website lose rankings. We don't know what it could be with the information you provided.

Maybe you need more content on the home page, it only has 6 sentences.

Check out your GWT to see what you can uncover.

That site doesn't deserve to rank. Come on! No content on the home page? Google can't tell what the keywords are.

Please read chapter 4. http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Sorry if I sound harsh, but how can the owner of that site possibly expect to rank without content?

@BJS, I would export a file from GWT  and filter the results. If your URLs are in GWT, then most likely it's indexed in Google.

Try to find one with eCommerce experience. If you are looking to spend $1000 one time, then you're probably going to run into trouble. The reason I say that is I have many people who call me up and ask if I can get them ranking for $x.xx. I always turn those deals down.

BUT if you are saying that your can invest $1000/mo, then you can probably find a consultant who can work with you on a small scale. At $1000/mo, that's $230/week which is very little for me, but okay for a newbie to SEO. That would pay someone $10/hr for about 23 hours of work.

I don't want to confuse you, but I want you to understand that the quality of a person who works for $10/hr is normally a lot less than someone who earns a lot more.

My recommendation... hire a SEO consultant to spec out what you need 1st, THEN hire someone.

I was going to suggest dinner where the phones aren't ringing and they don't have to answer emails. 
That's what I do with my local clients.

Use my site as an example. www.shipoverseas.com

The homepage is about "international car shipping".

All the landing pages are about "shipping cars to xyz country".

When I 1st started this site, I didn't know that my home page was going to be about "international car shipping". I thought I was going to try to have it rank for "ship car to Europe", "ship car to au", "ship car to africa". Instead I made categories + landing pages.

I hope that helps you organize your site.

Tim, my marketing strategy is based off what people are looking for, not what I think is best. Look into your GA to find these clues.

I would do full URLs. If your site gets scraped, you'll get a link pointing back.

Matt Cutts says those are symbols and that they are looked at as spaces.

This is WP links. These are probably results of a bot (maybe googlebot) going into your search bar and entering in numbers to see if there are any other pages they can discover. It's probaly nothing to worry about. I personally wouldn't worry about it

I AGREE! Sick with the one you are using right now. It's been 1 minute since I read your post and I still remember the "brandable" domain. I can't remember anything about the other one.