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Well, everyone might define "quality" different - so I would hate to say "yea that's TOTALLY fiine" but then find out that quality backlinks meant 300 press releases to you

What are you going to be doing to earn the backlinks?

I think you are mistaking "SEO" websites with "overly optimized" websites.  Just because you have a link from an SEO based website - like SEOMoz, doesn't mean you are overly optimizing your site.  SEOMoz is a high authority site and the link would be beneficial - of course relevance between the linking site and your site plays a part.

So to clarify - they are going to check your backlink profile to look for signals such as a large amount of competitive keyword anchor text from a variety of sites, a lot of backlinks from sites in  spaces that have nothing to do with yours, paid links, etc.

Affiliate sites are hard to rank because a great number of them are thin pages, scraped content and basically provide little value.

Affiliate sites in the pills, porn or casino niches will also be a lot more difficult to rank... but if you are opening up an affiliate site outside of those niches, and concentrating on providing useful content, then it should be just as difficult as any other site - depending on the competitive landscape.

Sitewide links aren't great for SEO, but it probably won't really hurt you - and really only 1 link per domain is the highest valued - the rest are weighed differently.   How strong is your current link-profile?  Having sitewide links in the menu of another site may make the links appear as paid links - especially if you haven't built up a really strong backlink profile yet.

I would still err on the side of caution and suggest requesting your partner to link to you on their homepage somewhere instead of their menu.

Hi, which version of the domain has the most incoming links/authority? Also compare top level pages for www vs non www.  I would make my decision on that and then redirect the appropriate one and add a rel=can tag.  If you have pages from the other that are ranking, make sure you are 301ing the individual pages to each page rather than doing a sitewide that just 301s all non www pages to the www homepage (or vice versa).

A common practice is to provide a page for affiliates to access that has unique content, images, banners, etc for affiliates to use.  This can be anything from descriptions, to blog posts.  Affiliates are pretty busy and appreciate short-cuts, so providing that information to them makes their job easier, and prevents you from the possibility of any duplicate content penalties.

Just to make sure I am understanding:

You are trying to rank for the following 3 keywords:

Towels

Egyptian Cotton Towels

Personalized Towels

If that is the case, I recommend that you do not attempt to rank for the single word "Towels".  This is too broad of a term and doesn't reflect buyer intent.  You may want to look into keywords like "Bathroom Towels" or "Buy Cotton Towels" instead.

Since I recommend disregarding that keyword, you could take that single term out of your title tag to cut down on some of that keyword usage.

The 1 word in your URL category is fine

Meta description - don't worry about, that doesn't affect on page optimization at all.  It is good to use for CTR though, so you may want to find ways to make it sound less repetitive and add a call to action.

There are a lot of references to the word "towels" in content though.  You can definitely remove those or substitute other words, or just leave some areas as something like "Egyptian Cotton" because the user is likely to know you are referring to towels in that context.

For example, your top graphic with "Towels" could possibly be rewritten to say

We offer a variety of towels to meet your needs:

• Egyptian Cotton
• Personalized and Embroidered
• For the Nursery
• For the Beach

You can probably find other areas on the page to do this as well.

I think cutting back on these references would make your internal menu links fine.  If you do change those as well, consider doing some user testing to make sure people can still find what they are looking for.

It depends on what your branding strategy is, are you trying to develop more of a brand and reputation as Joe Smith, owner of Acme Widgets, or do you want Acme Widgets to be a well known resource for all things widget related?

I personally think doing both is a great idea - it takes more time but you get the benefits of both.

You will have a little bit of a harder time as a business rather than an individual though, people want to see  human faces in their stream, not logos - you should still use a logo or mascot that represents the business though, otherwise this will be confusing.

People are generally leary about following businesses and dont want to be marketed to.  Due to this uphill battle you will have to really focus on a great content strategy to connect with users, provide useful information and go out of your way to find and answer questions.

It also doesn't hurt to humanize your brand a bit.  Use words like "We" a lot and not "our company" or "Acme Widgets" - make jokes and be transparent.  You can also add a picture of the individual behind "@AcmeWidgets" to the twitter background to help give it that human element.

Also regardless of which account you are on, concentrate on connecting to users and sharing great content - don't spend the majority of your time talking about yourself, your company or your widgets.  People will get turned off by the over-promotion.

Depending on your sites hierarchy and structure, the sitemap may make the whole crawling process easier for Google rather than making the crawler dig through your menus and links to find pages within your site.  So in that case, it wont limit Google.

Sitemaps can also include instructions on how often a page changes to determine how often Google should revisit that page.  If your pages that have already been crawled are fairly static and do not change often, set the crawl frequency rate to low so you dont have to worry about taking up too much of your crawling bandwidth on already indexed pages.

Here is a good blog post about setting your sitemap page priority levels:

http://www.seoboy.com/does-setting-priority-and-frequency-in-your-sitemap-help-increase-rankings/

Google determines what links to place here based on the pages it feels are most relevant.   You cannot suggest new pages to add to the sitelinks at this time, but if there is a page showing that you do not want as a sitelink, you can tell Google to not display that page in Google Webmaster Tools.

Sites that are new are not as trusted, and have a more difficult time ranking for exact terms.  As your site gains authority you should start seeing some additional traffic for more specific terms - depending on your site's level of optimization, industry and keywords you are targeting.   Traffic will always be a mix of brand, long tail, and more exact KWs though.

Hi

I would say yes, I am of the belief that a sitemap is never a bad idea and submitting one (even later on) won't hurt anything.  It also sounds like you have a rather large site, so this will help get those new pages added each month crawled.   Even if all of your URLs are indexed, you can still use sitemaps to provide Google with information about other content such as videos and mobile versions of your site (if any).  It should actually help the crawler rather than hinder it.

As far as generator sites, I don't have a particular one to recommend but doing a google search for "sitemap generator" pulls up a lot of results.  You may want to test some of those and see what works best for your needs as many of them limit the number of pages crawled.

If you are using a CMS like Wordpress or Joomla there are sitemap plugins to help with this process.

Is the website new, or is it pretty well established?

^ This

Also make sure that your canonical tags (if you had any) aren't pointing to your old URL.  Common issue if transferring over all content.

By broad do you mean more long-tail search terms?  This is pretty normal, especially if the exact keywords are in a competitive space.

I am not a lawyer, so this should not be construed as legal advice

I am fairly positive that would violate copyright laws, intellectual property laws, and possibly and right of publicity.  You would need to get permission from the creators of the TV shows/commercials to use the clips.  You should consult with a lawyer/attorney to be safe. Many will offer free consultations.  Some things may be protected by the Parody law.

If you do go ahead with this, I would also suggest purchasing liability insurance first to ensure you are protected should anyone sue you.

I suggest checking out some of these videos from Reel SEO about legal issues when creating videos

http://www.youtube.com/legalvideoguys

You can't really rely on Google Webmaster Tools for accurate incoming link counts.  I would measure against Open Site Explorer.  Have you checked there and they have gone down as well?

Quantcast and Compete are good

Will the content be in a different language? If so I would recommend the sub-directory.  If not, the TLD.  Personal preference, Google has said you could use either - but I can see a lot of duplicate content issues if the sub-directory is in the same language.

Hi

I took a quick look at your site and noticed some SEO issues you probably want to address ASAP. I know you mentioned content in your original thread, I am going to touch on that briefly here as well, because I think this will add a lot of value to both users and search engines.

Less Immediate

General Stuff

Content:

Homepages and some of the main inner pages such as Web Design and Web Marketing don't offer a lot of content.  The main section pages have a decent amount of content related to your clients, but I would suggest providing some content that gives an overview of your services, as this is not only helpful to users but will also naturally include some important keywords.

H1

A lot of your pages lack H1 tags.  While a small signal, it still would be beneficial to add some optimized H1s where possible.

Titles

Some of your titles could be more optimized.  Your homepage for example only has your company name.  You can add some useful keywords to this to make it more user friendly in the SERPs as well as better optimized.  For example instead of just "Fenway Media UK" you could have "Fenway Media UK - Edinburgh Web Design - Development."

I would go through the site and look for areas that don't include your company name - and include that along with your keywords, and areas that include keywords but no company name.  This way the titles are consistent and you make sure it is optimized both for company name and services.

Recommend fixing these ASAP!!

Technical:

I recommend using breadcrums throughout the site.  Once you get to deeper pages, you have to navigate back through your browser (or use the menu to return to the main home page).  Breadcrumbs will be user friendly as well as help SEO.

The biggest issue I found is with your /seo-web-marketing/ directory.  Most of these URLs have canonical tags that point to a 404 page, and as a result few of them are indexed.

Here is a list of the ones I saw:

http://www.fenwaymedia.co.uk/seo-web-marketing/application-development
points to
http://www.fenwaymedia.co.uk/seo-web-marketing/appdev

http://www.fenwaymedia.co.uk/seo-web-marketing/content-creation-distribution
points to
http://www.fenwaymedia.co.uk/seo-web-marketing/content-creation

http://www.fenwaymedia.co.uk/seo-web-marketing/organic-link-creation
points to
http://www.fenwaymedia.co.uk/seo-web-marketing/link-creation

http://www.fenwaymedia.co.uk/seo-web-marketing/pay-per-click
points to
http://www.fenwaymedia.co.uk/seo-web-marketing/ppc

Also your sitemap has a canonical tag that points to an old 404'd sitemap:
http://www.fenwaymedia.co.uk/site-map
points to
http://www.fenwaymedia.co.uk/sitemap

Hope that helps!