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First issue is regarding links to domain ratio.  Do a quick audit of the top 10 competitors for any of your terms.  Run them through majestic and see what their ratio is.  It will always be a multiple.  The ratio isn't as much a problem as the source.  For instance, if you are active on an authority blog within your niche, you might comment on lots of posts.  Since the blog is an authority and there isn't much spam, these are relevant and higher value links than blog spam where someone ran a bot and found spam ready blog networks that will take your links all day long and all of the commenter names are exact match keywords instead of natural looking names.  In this example, the ratio might be the same, but there is a big difference in the SEO impact to your site.

I advise against a footer link attribute back to your site.  This is bad form and it does not add value to your clients or their visitors - all web developers should consider stopping this practice.  As far as SEO goes, I doubt most of your client sites are within your niche , so what signal do you think that is sending.  Using an anchor text about your topic and putting it on a client's site on a different topic doesn't make sense from an SEO standpoint.  Besides footer links and attributes already having low power, adding them to unrelated niche sites is not going to help you in my opinion.  There are plenty of cases of these footer links getting web developers penalized in Penguin over the past 12 months.

Is your objective SEO or self-advertising?  If you are proud of your work and just want the advertising, then use your brand (company name) without a link: "Site design by Company Name."  Let potential clients find you by searching for you name which helps your authority.

Hope this helps.

You should redirect by mapping the pages appropriately.  The old sites seems like you are kind of abandoning it, so whatever rankings it currently has, will likely drop over time and the links will lose value.  As long as you are staying active with the new site, everyone wins - visitors get to an active site that is being updated, instead of an abandoned one.  You win because you are not going to have to worry about the old site or losing that traffic or losing link juice.  The search engines win because when they send traffic to the old URLs, the visitor ends up on a better site with fresh content.

If you dive into Google Analytics/ GWT, you can get some great information like this - and it's free.  Not sure the exact reason you want to follow specific individual behavior, but if you are trying to gather more intel on how "hot"  your prospect is, then you may want to consider looking into marketing automation software.  These are designed to track individuals and score them.  They can even integrate them into your CRM like Salesforce.

Do a search for marketing automation software.  Here are a few to consider, from low cost to higher cost, higher functionality:  Optify, Act-On, Hubspot, Marketo.

Peter,

Definitely add it to every page, not just the home page.

As John mentioned, aesthetics are important in determining the best locations.  Here are a couple of considerations:

1. Aesthetics and usability (where it will best benefit the visitor while also achieving your goal)
2. Common areas where it will be automatically inserted into each new page, especially in CMS/ blog sites, such as footer or sidebar

Limitations occur when you have a business with multiple locations (more than 2 or 3), as it will start to create aesthetic and space problems for you.  In these situations, you will have to determine the best method on a case by case basis.  For example, if you have a bank with one main location and 10 branches in a metro area.  You may decide to run the main office location schema on the common pages and then use the individual location schema on their specific contact/ location pages.

Hope this helps.

Definitely use the local number on your main number in Google+ Local/ Places - Google guidelines.  You should also use this in your NAP schema on your page.  You can list the 800 as the alternative number if you choose, but not sure it adds value to local searchers especially in the maps.

As long as you have your authorship set up properly on your primary blog, and you are linking to it, it likely won't hurt your primary blog/ site - unless you get carried away and post it on dozens or hundreds of 3rd party sites.  Make sure it gets indexed on your original site first, before publishing elsewhere.

I understand you may be wanting to keep the blog post in its entirety on the 3rd party sites in order to provide value, but I would recommend that you use really solid summaries/ excerpts and then "click here to read more" type link that takes them to the full article on your main blog.  They will still get the full value, and you will get the extra targeted traffic to your main blog.

In PetSitters Plus example, Google hasn't made the connection with a website.  The most common reason you will see this issue is when there is confusion and Google hasn't made this connection or the website doesn't exist, so it defaults to the Google+ page.  This is fairly common in unclaimed/ unverified listings where Google has only pulled the info from it's data sources which do not have the actual website info.

There are some other issues occurring due to the Google+ merge transition, but I don't think those issues are causing this example you have shown.

Press Releases are meant to get picked up by lots of media outlets.  That's the point.  For example, if you submit to PR Web, your press release will end up on hundreds of sites.  I know from experience that it does not hurt you as I do daily for my clients and my own sites/ companies.  It helps as long as they are optimized well and have high quality content that people will want to read.  Google et al will select the "best" one(s) to keep in th SERPs and the rest will drift away.  Even though those pages with the press release still exist, they have no impact positively or negatively for you, and you won't get a duplicate content penalty as the search engines knows how to treat News. 
I agree with Chris that you must understand where they fit into your overall strategy.  They are only one small piece of the process.  If you build a strategy relying on press releases, you are going to be losing that treadmill battle.

As Takeshi said, you shouldn't be getting a duplicate title error if each location in the title is different.  Definitely should check Google Webmaster Tools as he said.  I suspect it may be a canonical problem, or www vs non-www duplicate content issue.  Or perhaps an http and https issue.  Without knowing your site details, that would be something to check.

Definitely stay away from listing all 3 across there like that.  Based on the search numbers you have provided, and assuming that they are equally competitive as you have stated, here is a suggested title:

Managed IT Services and Support | Company Name

You could replace the pipe '|' with 'by' if you wanted to make it flow better in the visitor's mind.

This focuses on your most searched term for this page (since they are equally competitive, go after the volume).  You will not be neglecting the other 2 by doing this, as the search engines are smart enough to understand the association as long as you have good copy on the page.  We have lots of pages that rank #1 without the keyword in the Title tag.

In this new example, the query was for the actual domain name since it is also the business name: eyeglasses.com.  You are already being served the cluster of direct domain listings, so when the Google+ listing is finally shown, it shows the Google+ listing link (in a single pack).

Typically, the main reason this occurs in a larger local pack is because of the disconnect between Google+ and the business website.  There is quite a bit of confusion going on with this now since the Google+ Business page and the Google+ local (Places) page are not fully merged in many cases.  What has happened in these situations is the business owner (or representative agency) set up a Google+ business page, but failed to claim/ verify and optimize the Google+ Local (Places) page, which is still sitting there unlinked to the main website.

Wow, that is really a bad situation and sounds like you are going to be very limited.  When I mentioned limitation, I was referring to things such as Google Analytics Admin.  Some of the platform sites have their Google Analytics account Admin, but will not give Admin and GWMT access to 3rd parties (marketing agencies).   They package in Analytics with their platform monthly rates and set Analytics to mail a report to the client each month.  I have had developers refuse to add a video sitemap.  I have had some that gave me access to their site backend, but it was hosted on an IIS server and required them to do the manual 301 redirects, and they refused to do this.  These are just a few examples of "limitations" I have seen.

Having said that, I really feel your pain here.  In your initial question, you called this a "great prospective client," but it is not a great situation as there seems to be a bad breakup with residual bad internal politics.  Without knowing your entire situation, here are my recommendations based on what you have mentioned so far:

Option 1 is to not accept the project as it might be too draining and time consuming because of the company politics.

Option 2 is to start by placing proper expectations with the person hiring you - sounds like you have established a good relationship with them.  You have to let them know how important on-site optimization is and how the IT dept seem to be unreasonable.  Without onsite optimization, your entire campaign is going to be inefficient - it will take a ton more work offsite in order to get results and it is not ideal.  Even blogging sounds like a serious pain in that it has to go to a test server first, then you have to wait for an IT person who doesn't "get it" to approve.  You should also consider raising your rates because of the situation.  This is not typical, so your typical rates that you may have quoted may no longer apply now that you know the whole story.

Anyway, good luck with this. I hope it works.  I would love to hear how it plays out.

Unfortunately Google is still in limbo here.  They are moving forward, very slllloooowwwwllllyy.  Last May '12, they started the move from Google Places to Google+Local.  Previously Places was too static and didn't allow enough engagement, etc as they were dropping the Google+ overlay onto all of their properties.  Well it has been over a year and they are still in limbo.  You fall into the category of non-merged.  You shouldn't do anything right now until they finish the transition.  It will only cause problems as Oleg suggested.

We have seen a lot of our clients already merged, while many aren't.  Until it happens, you need to make sure that you have everything completed on both and that it matches up.  Don't neglect the Places page

The best guideline to telling which of the 3 scenarios you fall into, is outlined perfectly (with visuals) in the Search Engine News Local Search book (called Unfair Advantage) that was just updated this month.  You fall into the category that they suggest to not do anything with right now.

I agree with Thomas on the hosting.  I haven't personally used Zippy Kid, Pagely, or Presslabs, but I do use WPEngine and Synthesis.  I am in the process of migrating 2 more sites over to Synthesis this week.

There are lots of great benefits to host your wordpress on these servers.  They are built very specifically for Wordpress and have gotten rid of the bloat of a traditional server.  Your sites will load faster, even without a CDN.  They keep everything backed up and secure too.  Peace of mind is what I always look for in a web host and that is what you get when you host with a team that loves wordpress and only do wordpress.

There is not enough room to cover all the benefits and details.  Just look them up and be sure to read the FAQs on each.

Keyword does not have to be in your Brand name or your domain.  You can compensate on deeper pages as needed.  You unique brand name will separate you from everyone and better build your asset.

I have seen similar situations to what Jonathan described (even in some of my own online projects/ businesses).

Having said that, while EMD's are being carefully watched now, I do not think they will automatically hurt you.  What hurts you is not providing value to your target market on your domain, regardless of whether it is a brand or EM domain.  Most people that squat on an EMD blog never put high quality, high value content.  At best they typically throw crap articles on them occasionally.  This is just adding pollution to cyberspace and we should all fight pollution;-)

This is reinforced by the link Thomas included:

"One common misconception is that EMD means that sites with search terms in their domain names no longer will rank as well as in the past. I’ve not seen evidence of this so far, and it’s certainly not what Google said.

Google specifically said EMD was designed to go after poor quality sites that also have exact match domain names."

Nice work!  It's always great to hear success stories and gives us a little more inspiration to keep up the communication until we get what we want;-)

Agree with your conclusion.  Go with your brand and build the asset.  Exciting!