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You should use rel=canonical tag on duplicate content pages. Google can read text embedded as an image through OCR algorithm. So duplicate image is not a good option. Moreover think how these images will increase the load time of the web pages.

Hi Dean,

What course you pursue depends a lot on your professional goals and not on what you are being offered. If you want to pursue a career in SEO then their is no need to be Adwords certified (though basic knowledge of adwords always help). However analytics certification is definitely going to help you no matter whether you choose SEO or PPC, both or any internet marketing field.

Google will ignore this tag.

Try Google keyword tool. Enter your site address and click on the search button. Sort the results by relevance. Analyze the top 100 results and you may get an idea of what Google thinks about your site.

It is not going to make any difference. Time is better spend in fixing crawling & indexing issues of the website.

There is no such thing like that. You have been misinformed.

Did you try eightfoldlogic and ontolo? Then there are also advanced search queries like : Keyword + inurl:category/guest, Keyword + “guest post” etc which can help in finding guest post opportunities.

phpb has major security issues and its back end is not as Good as vbulletin.

A site with a lower domain/page authority may get filtered out by Google. Why don't you use cross domain canonical tags if you can't fix the duplicate content issue at the moment. There is a good post on this topic on seomoz. You just need to search for it.

Your aim should be high search engine rankings and conversions, not grades. Please bear in mind that seomoz grading system just promote seo best practices they don't have 1 to 1 correlation with search rankings. So i will suggest you to focus on link building instead.

Check all traffic sources report in your Google Analytics account and determine which traffic sources have experienced a significant drop in traffic in the last few days. If it is Google organic, then determine the keywords which are sending less traffic now. Always check your analytics whenever you experience a significant rise or drop in traffic.

you can check the crawling date of any page by clicking on the 'cached' link in SERP or through Google toolbar.

Yes most probably. Incoming links play an important role in crawling and indexing of a web page.

No they don't need to have absolutely unique product description. You can make your product pages unique through user generated contents (UGC) like comments, reviews etc. However in the end you must find a way to create uniqueness on your product pages.

pages which are hosted on web servers located in Australia.

There are no such rules. The frequency of crawling & indexing depends a lot on how frequently you post new contents on your website. If you post new contents several times a day, then Google may crawl & index your web pages within minutes.