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Sorry SeoMoz!

I usually use Majestic Seo to check my backlink process.  I don't know the timelines for when they update, but their charts make me feel better about my link building (since the usually show growth).

I'm at the 18,000 mark with mine (Actually much lower because of Title and Body being counted separately)

We have 10+ matches of each Make/Model of new vehicles, a finance page for each of those vehicles (going away soon), a test drive page for each of those vehicles (going away soon), request more info page for each of those vehicles (going away soon), as well as some other random duplicates.  It's been a process to convince the developer to do any of it...

I have unpersonalized Google searches in Firefox, as well as my data cleared out all the time, but I always end up with personalized searches.  I just feel more confident using something that is "untainted."

Do U.S. teams usually have a marketing/Public Relations department?  Do you think you could get interviews with players and coaches?

I'm wondering if I should if should optimize our ecommerce categories to be descriptive or use abbreviations to help keep the URL length to a minimum?

What kind of search traffic could your categories generate?  If they do generate a lot, I would just create a landing page specifically for that portion, and then use /short-category/exact-match-best-served-product-phrase

Like:

/shoes/whatever-shoes-kids-are-wearing-these-days

What kind of content do you think is missing that they might be able to fill?  The only thing I know about soccer is that you need an SUV to haul your kids around

I use a separate browser to search my rankings.  I kept getting biased results from the three browsers I use (Chrome, IE, Firefox), so I downloaded Opera for the sole purpose of checking ranking.  I never click anything with it, and always clear my data from it.  It's been pretty accurate over the last 8 months.

That's the right bias to have!

I would test the difficulty of each keyword, and get a sense of what your competition is doing for on-page SEO.  Something people optimize more for one word than the other.

That being said, I would look for a person who specializes in on-page: Code, Content and Connectivity

Because of the nature of their product, I would assume they are producing no-follow links, right?  If so, there is no perceivable value for SEO.  I guess a more important thing, though, is that purchasing links does have a risk involved with it.  There are supposedly some good companies out there for it (I haven't tried any), but there is always a risk when doing these practices.

It might be more worth your money to hire a writer to create totally amazing SEO optimized content.

Yikes! Who would want to start over with link building to a subdomain!?

Glad I could help

Just like external links are little votes from outside sources of what is an important article on your website, internal links are your little voting system.  It's your way of telling Google/Bing what your page is about, and how important it is.  So, you are going to want more internal links pointing at your important (money making) pages than something like a disclaimer.

However, you have to put these internal links in perspective of your other pages.  If one of your pages has 2000 links, and then next highest is 20, you should look at balancing it out a little.

For an overall ranking perspective, exact match is going to be better (all other things being completely equal).  However, websites are never perfect vacuums of comparison.  Regardless of which format you choose, you will still be able to overcome your competition through proper on-page optimization, and great link building.

From the Matt Cutts video I saw earlier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9vD9KGK7G8&feature=player_embedded

It seems like it would be better to put the Geo specific pages on a subdirectory of your website, and geo target it with Webmaster tools.  Then, you can start building local, and relevant, links to that page or directory.

I was getting at that, but I wasn't going to outright say it until I knew if he had links pointing there or not. lol

I agree, the ranking aspect isn't as important of consideration, but the CTR can be benefited from an exact match: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2086693/Exact-Match-Domains-Can-Double-Clicks-on-PPC-Ads

The search volumes look about the same for either one (currently 110-74), and the difficulty level is about the same for either phrase.  So, I would choose the top one since it would be easier for a customer to just type in if they recommend it to a friend.

How does your internal and external linking look?

Make sure they are part of the actual structure of your website, not just part of search.  Meaning, you have to have links pointing at them.  Also, you will also want to make sure that those pages have value.