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I think that your mention of poetry actually touches on another semi-imporant point... people respond well to humor/informality.  Professionalism is all well and good, but at the end of the day, someone with a simple question doesn't want to read through a paragraph and a half of SEO jargon and technical advice. If you can state something simply, do so.  And while you're at it, if you can make them smile while reading, do that too.

I like all of the answers here and I would definitely focus on how the user is searching for the lawyers.  If you have a site with millions of lawyers, they would each have an area of practice so it would make sense to develop a structure around this first: lawyerz.com/practice-area/state/city/attorney-name WIth this structure, a searcher that types in "estate planning lawyer" would be sent to the estate planning lawyers page and allowed to search further for their city and then lawyer names.  I would attach the contact info, reviews directly on that lawyer's page. Since your higher volume keywords are going be found within the "practice areas", this would seem the next step after the main domain target of "attorney" or "lawyers".  Then, location can come third, attorney name is most likely a lesser searched keyword but using a url structure such as "attorney-john-doe" reinforces. I would LOVE to hear all the expert opinions about this as I am a newbie to seomoz but am finding some great experts and advice over here.

Just caught this a bit late and probably to late to add something but my two pence is test it in Webmaster Tools, via Crawl -> Robot.txt tester - if you've not used this before simply add the url you want to test and Google highlights the directive that allows or disallows it.

thanks for taking the time, excellent response. what we are hoping to do is to provide a SEO lite version of our content out for syndication that has the ability to rank but not out rank us. the partners we are speaking with only want to do business with us if these pages can be indexed in Google and have the chance of ranking. cookstr seems to be accomplishing this with stronger SEO on their page and weaker syndicated content on partner sites ensuring that cookstr comes up first in searches.

External anchor text (in combination with your content) would iron any misconceptions Google may get from internal link anchor text. Internal anchor text is of course a significant hint but I think you are safe and this is why... Google treats boilerplate and navigational elements with less editorial value (footer, navigation, sidebars) so if your article/content based anchor text is correct you will end up with those single letter links simply passing link juice around and editorial links passing meaningful tips to Google about your content. This behaviour was confirmed by Matt Cutts in one of his recent videos on YouTube.

I know this is an old post, but when I tested that link in the rich snippets testing tool, it doesn't appear to have valid markup. So until that is fixed the photo won't show ....

how are you going to noindex a cgi-bin, or scripts, or pdfs you don't want indexed or image folders with the noindex meta though

For sure! I figured it's a question that has crossed people's minds before (I know it has for me!) so if you see anyone else wondering, I wanted you to have something to point them to Thanks! Carin

can you elaborate? our server is returning a 404 `Results of the GSiteCrawler Server-Test Tested at 9/21/2011 12:13:46 AM / from 68.197.76.222: URL=http://www.vitals.com/badURL Result code: 404 (NotFound / Not Found)`

I've used the review markup quite a bit, and Google Places has added a link to the reviews on one of my client's Reviews page. I know Google Places also factors some (who knows how they choose?) of the reviews into their local algo. I also use some geo tagging and author type markups (see the main and contact page of my site). It works, and it will only get better Hope that helps Andy

I think that the number of links you're gaining might cause a problem, not to mention the quality of those links. Google assumes a natural pattern in link acquisition, so when you suddenly jump from 5 links per week to 500, that triggers a red flag because it doesn't appear natural. How many hours are you spending on this link directory? Perhaps you could take the same amount of time to write a well-researched guest post, or some other type of op-ed piece. That type of content is much more likely to earn the type of high quality targeted links you're looking for, without junking up your link profile.

Nothing. Try again...