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Changing the content to show a bot something different than regular user is always considered black hat and is frowned upon.

That being said, if you're trying to create different messages based on where the user came from, you may want to consider something like a bright box to provide direction and interaction to the visitor.  Some general text in the page like that could be dynamic without being considered deceitful to Google.

I would have to recommend not trying to show Google something completely different than what users see in any regard.

Also keep in mind that SEO is not an exact science.  There are methods that should produce results, but there are no guarantees that the company can rank your for the keywords you want at the price you're willing to pay.  Theoretically, given the budget, any company can rank for any keyword they want, but you probably aren't going to be happy with the price tag.  They're a company too, so the more work it's going to take them to rank you, the more it's going to cost.

Sounds like that keyword is just very specific and there won't be much competition for it.

PA and DA are just 1 of the many ranking factors for SERPS.  DA not as much.  Consider a blog you set up at wordpress.com.  Your DA is 100 because it's a wordpress.com domain, but your page authority will still be 0. Will that DA help you out eventually?  Sure, but to start, it's not going to make you rank that much higher.  Perhaps that's why your expert writes it off as important.

If you're stuck on doing this, I would recommend using a backend programming language like .Net or PHP to detect the Google Bot and generate a completely different page.  That being said, it's highly black hat, and I wouldn't recommend doing anything close to it.  Google doesn't like being fooled and has stated it penalizes for sites that try to display different content to the bot and users who browse the site normally.

The canonical tags are definitely applicable to this situation once Google goes everything again and sorts it all out with the new tags.

I would say it's worth the effort to give your main site a boost.  IMO the more content you can get on your own site that's relevant, the more Google has to base it's evaluation off you.  If your blog has alot of fresh content, that'll keep Google coming back for more!

Just to follow up on this.  the meta tag for this is

I think you may be thinking of the updates that says links in footers are bad now?  Correct me if I'm wrong.  I believe the intent of that is that site wide links in footers of other peoples sites that link to yours are devalued.  This means that you won't be getting link juice from every page on their website like you would expect.

Links in your own footer should be for the benefit of your visitors first, and I think that's what you've done with your links.  If you're trying to mold your PageRank in a specific way, try breadcrumbs or internal linking from the content of the page.

Thanks for the lead to myblogguest.

Your plan sounds good too.  I'll second the no spun articles concept.  There's such little benefit to them.

Start with On-Page optimization - IE get your keywords into your content.  Then I would just start reading SEO blogs until you have enough understanding of what's going on to branch out from there.

Thanks for the knowem.com link.  I have to use it more, but it looks like a promising organizational tool.

Just because you have WordPress running your blog, doesn't mean WordPress has access to edit the files of the main eCommerce site.  You can install a standalone WordPress blog in examples.com/blog and have regular HTML files serving example.com

You can also takes steps to secure your WordPress installation on top of this.

Low budget just means you have to put the time in yourself.  Good content takes time to create, and if you can't outsource it, then you're stuck with doing it on your lunch breaks

Ouch.  All the thumbs down aren't really necessary.  Margaret is just sharing what seems to be working for her.  If it works for your niche, then go for it.

24 hours isn't out of the ordinary.  I've had a site with a blog that took close to 3 days to complete a full crawl.  You could use the report card page if you're looking for an update regarding those changes for a specific page or two.

If the comments above haven't swayed you from looking at density, SEO Quake has a plugin for Firefox that will analyze all the words on your page and give you density for each word and each phrase.  It may bring to light some phrases you weren't meaning to target, or show you a word you have much too high a density of by mistake.

I second the time frame issue.  1 month won't be enough time and your work will just benefit the next person this client gets to work on it, while you'll be left with an upset client because of bad expectations.

I don't believe the actual tag pages are the issue here.  It's the fact that the same page can be accessed by 3 different url's because of the tags it's under.  Canonical links will take care of this.

The 301 will give you the credit you're looking for.  You can't really control how people link to you unless you're actually creating the link, so you just have to bear with it.  Be sure to emphasize the non-www address when you're trying to get links so you get the full value of the link.  The issue with non-www is that allot of people are accustomed to typing in a www and may ignore any suggestion you provide.