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Here's a guide that gives you some more sites that can help: http://www.seomoz.org/article/keyword-research-guide

It's a little dated, but most of the stuff on there should still exist.

Personally, some of the strategies I used are:

1. Look at my analytics. Where are my visitors coming from? Are there any similar terms using synonyms or different word order that I need to target?

2. Look at competitors. What keywords are they targeting? You can find hints by looking at their content, title tags, meta tags (if they're well-optimized, that is).

I think another important question to ask is Am I ranked as highly as I can be for the higher-volume terms? To me, I'd rather effectively target the terms that the most people are searching for rather than attempt to target a lot of low-volume long tail terms.

I would 301 redirect the index.html page to the http://www.domain.com/keyword-is-here. There's no reason to have both pages if they're the exact same content.

This is sorta covered under the "SEO Best Practice" section from page I sent you to: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization (although I know it can be a little unclear)

This page also gives a good yet slightly different explanation that might be easier to follow. Scroll down to the "Canonical and Duplicate Versions of Content" section with the pink diamonds: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development

Yes, these things can still work and produce results, but they are not the preferred or best strategies by any means.

I really like this post for link-building ideas: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

He includes your strategies (although with varying levels of support) and he recommends Ezinearticles as one site to use.

Is the detailed report showing check marks that "corporate catering" is in the meta description and other areas that it's not in? For what it's worth, corporate catering does appear in the URL, Title, and H1. It also is displayed in the nav bar.

They should appear on the day that your weekly ranking reports post. If that's Thursday of every week, you won't see them until next week if the new keywords were added today.

Mine show a little calendar graphic with the day the rankings will be posted for the first time for new keywords.

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In my experience, it does a good job of picking up the canonical tags. In fact, if you go into your campaign, go into the Crawl Diagnostics section, then click the blue "Notices" button, it will show you how many "Rel canonical" URLs were picked up.

If you're not getting many pages shown here, perhaps you should recheck to be sure your tags are implemented properly.

I don't think that Creative Commons license applies unless they explcitly state that on the news site.

For example, CNN.com says "All Right Reserved" at the bottom of their page. If you check out the terms and conditions, it says "You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in any way exploit, any of the content, in whole or in part. You may download copyrighted material for your personal use only."

MSNBC.com is even more clear on their Terms and Conditions: "You may not modify, copy, reproduce, republish, upload, post, transmit, or distribute in any way any material from this site including code and software without express permission from MSNBC or as permitted inReprint Requests ."

I'm not an expert, but taking 30% of their content does not seem to meet their rules for reproducing their content no matter if you're attributing the source or not. Perhaps a quote or two from an article is fine, but 30% sounds like a lot.

Perhaps the sites that Shahzad is using do follow Creative Commons, but many of the major news sites do not seem to do that.

Have you considered using the Mozrank instead of Alexa? This might be a better metric, plus it's easy to see if you use the MozBar extension for your browser. I definitely recommend this instead if you're attempt to obtain links for SEO value on any site (not just limited to article sites).

I'm not sure I would recommend article marketing for traffic like you're going after. Creating great content on your own site or guest posting on related industry blogs will almost certainly be a better strategy than submitting to general article sites.

In terms of the Yoast SEO plugin, it's really not that complicated no matter what you're level.

There's a brief description of how to use it here: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

This post is very handy, too: http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-install-and-setup-wordpress-seo-plugin-by-yoast/

Have you considered switching to simply "noindex, follow" for these pages? This would both keep them out of the search index and would allow for the benefit of external links to these pages.

There's a form here for reporting spammy Gmail addresses to Google. I'm not sure how responsive they are or how well this works: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=abuse I've had a lot of luck with captchas in the past for reducing spam. But if an actual person is filling in your form and sending you spam, this obviously won't help. I've seen blog sites with a checkbox to "confirm you are a human" which can supposedly stave off automated captcha readers.

No, Googlebot does not accept cookies.

I think you're right that Google has discounted the value of exact match domains now as it's not as easy to increase rankings solely on the merit of the domain alone. However, I don't agree that exact match domains aren't helpful at all anymore. I see cases all the time where exact match domains are very higher in search rankings in Google. Value of having the exact match domain may be "dying," but I wouldn't say it's dead yet. If this is a new domain with no domain authority, it does you no help to simply redirect from that domain to yours regardless of how good the keywords in the new domain are. At minimum you would need to build up the new domain to get any value out of it (unless you you want to buy the domain just to ensure competitors don't get a hold of it).

I agree with eyepaq. Your friend is mostly likely suggesting this in an attempt to rank for both of the phrases - "Bars in New York" and "Bars New York"

If that's the case,  there are better ways to target different keyword phrases than trying get it all into the title tag.

Thanks for your help, I get it now!

In addition to your video, I also found a post on Matt Cutts' blog that answers it:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

Just so I'm understanding correctly, you're asking about linking to the sites that are already linking to you? If so, there's no added SEO benefit of linking to them because they're already linking to you. If anything, it could be harmful as too many reciprocal links can be bad for SEO.

As a general rule, I'd say just link out to anything that's worthwhile to link to. Like Keith, I'm not a huge fan of blog rolls, either. Instead, you could just link out from a content page in a context that makes sense.

Has it just been one day? I'd give it at least a day or two more before panicking. Things tend to move around in Google like that.

Meta keywords and description have zero direct impact on SEO rankings.

Don't bother filling in meta keywords at all. It's a waste of time.

Meta descriptions can be important for getting clicks, but they won't help for where you rank in Google if you're trying to optimize the descriptions with keywords.