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Often a homepage ranks better than internal pages for the reason you suggest, more links (and probably other things). And yes, internal linking can help.

Does it make sense to link to one of your internal pages from your home page? You are talking about the blue widgets, so you link to the blue-widget page?

If you are worried about tanking all of your ranking, pick just one of the keywords you think is being cannibalized and try working on only that one at first.

Google has a number of ways to find pages, including links from indexed pages (whether internal to the site or external) as well as sitemaps and Fetch as Google.

Most of the time when you come across a page like that (one that has few if any internal links) it's not an organic-traffic oriented page, it is set up for some other purpose, like a landing page for a marketing effort.

If you use a canonical tag, only one (whichever one is the canonical) will show up in the SERPs. Rather than trying to trick Google [history has shown this doesn't work in the long run ] you can either make two really different pages, separately targeting the two keywords, or if they are very closely related terms, you could use both variations on the page. You might even make it a stronger page by doing this. [See Cyrus Shepard's fascinating Moz blog article on Advanced On-Page SEO, especially where he talks about synonyms and close variants.]

Title is not a meta tag, as for the rest, order does not matter, they have to be somewhere in the head section. The id attribute can be used on any element in HTML5 and moving it to the end will make no difference. However in general it is best to keep a standard, consistent style. Why stir things up unnecessarily?

Google discontinued authorship back in August; apparently their tool hasn't caught up.

Right now, the MozBar only works in Chrome. (Scroll to the bottom of the thread to see the latest update.)

I love this add-on (I especially love it when I do a search and see all the data on each result) but you can get the same information by using the tools inside Moz, you just won't see it immediately as you look at different pages.

I myself prefer Firefox and was disappointed when the MozBar stopped working there. So my compromise is that I still mostly use Firefox but just switch to Chrome if I am doing something where the quick information from the MozBar would be useful. You could do the same with Safari.

If you were using florida-car-insurance and then changed it to car-insurance, you should 301 redirect florida-car-insurance to car-insurance to ensure that any page equity that you may have built for the original page is preserved.

Spammy signature links will not help you and they may well hurt you. If Google is ignoring them, that is a good thing.

You have it set to noindex.

<title>Automated Production - DNV Fabrication Lafayette, LA</title>

You could do a search using site:domain.com and see what (if any) pages Google has indexed for the site; if there are none, that is a bad sign.

You could also put the domain's URL in Open Site Explorer and take a quick look at the types of links the site has. (I myself have the Moz toolbar installed in my browser so when I go to a site I can quickly get an idea of its authority.)

In my experience, yes, you can regain value.

I redirected an old microsite with external links (which had been abandoned a few years prior) to the relevant page on my current, active site and that page quickly grew to become one of the strongest pages.

[There had been a thread on this here in Moz if you want to read more.]

Moz used to have such a list, but found keeping it up was beyond the time and resources they had available. The general advice given about getting listed in directories is that they should be good quality curated directories, relevant to your business.

In general, directory links are not as valuable as they used to be, and there are many low-quality ones out there, so be careful with this type of linking.

What do you see if you do a search for site:yoursite.com ?

As a general rule, a link that anyone can get by just placing one there is unlikely to give SEO benefit. And as mcncll said, most of those types of links are nofollow, anyway.

The benefit of the type of the type of link you are talking about is exposure and possible referral traffic. (Assuming the answer that is posted is a good one, of course.)

I understand the frustration of working with a big company where "because it is new" is a reason not to change the site. That is not a good way to run a business but inertia and people trying to protect their own positions often result in this type of situation. And there generally isn't much you can do to change this, sadly.

How terrible is the new site?

Does your client just not like it? Or did rankings/search volume/leads/sales plummet when it was introduced?

If it is the former, your client should just suck it up and stick with the current site design. It is the customers' preferences that matter and if the site is doing well, that is what counts.

If the latter then your client is right to want something different but I wouldn't count much on organic search traffic in that scenario. And I don't know that one working piece will drive company success, though perhaps your client hopes to use that smaller success to drive change for the rest of the site. Good luck with that.

Either way it solves your subdomain dilemma--in the first case you won't need one and in the second case it probably won't make a difference.

The order of attributes does not matter. [Don't you trust your developer? ]

It's great that you are working so hard on the SEO elements of your client's website but you should also keep your focus on the actual content. Rather than choosing what Moz or any other service has identified as the "best" keywords and writing around those, spend some time thinking about what the site's users would find interesting/informative/useful, write about that and then use what you have learned about SEO to help optimize those posts.

For clues about what the site's users want, look at your Analytics and see which current posts drive a lot of traffic and have good engagement numbers. Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) can show you search terms that are already doing well for you and you can build out content around those. Speak to people who work for the company and have contact with customers for insight into what questions they are being asked and what topics come up in conversations with buyers.

It's not an exact science, but it's not totally trial and error either.

I like option 2. You could put up some information about the searched-for boat and then follow up by saying that there are none available at this time but here are some similar boats, and add your links to those boats.

You could even add something about how each alternate choice is similar to/different from the original boat, if that is something that time allows. This would be useful to the searcher and keep your pages indexed. (Of course, this depends on how many pages we are talking about--it would be labor-intensive for thousands of pages...)

On the Home page of the Analytics beta in the upper left corner right under "MOZ" and "Select a Campaign" is a choice (in light blue letters) "Back to Pro". Click that and you are back on the old Home page.

You are correct, this has been discussed quite a bit—the answer is subfolder.

Here is an excellent, recent, thread on the subject: http://moz.com/community/q/i-have-a-blog-on-a-sub-domain-would-you-move-it-to-the-rood-domain-in-a-directory

Here is what Rand Fishkin has to say, with an example from moz.com: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating 

An excerpt from his response: "We recently were able to test this using a subdomain on Moz itself (when moving our beginner's guide to SEO from guides.moz.com to the current URL http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo). The results were astounding - rankings rose dramatically across the board for every keyword we tracked to the pages."