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Much better answer to the actual question!

What's your percentage of exact match links in your overall link landscape?  Is it over 20% (I would assume lower, but this is the number I've been hearing)?  If so, you are probably over-optimized for your phrase.  The best action would be to change the links to either your brand, or more preferably, to a similar phrase.

However, if you have less than 10% exact matching links, I wouldn't change those at all.  Exact match is still beneficial for ranking (but I doubt it will be forever), and you would actually have some room to grow with them.

With that in mind, remember to:

• Not focus on just one keyword at a time.  Gaining 50 Exact links in a row makes it obvious they aren't natural
• Use variations of your keyword, as well as exact.
• If it's your homepage, get a bunch of Brand links.
• Keep a couple poorly optimized links in there (unless they are from high quality sites!)

Article submission used to be the bees-knees (is that how the phrase is spelled?  Anyway...).  However, what you will really generate is a whole bucket load of duplicate content on the web.  To make matters worse, it's unlikely your articles will get picked up.

A better use of time is:

1. writing fantastic copy, citing sources with followed links (welcome back to high school!).
2. Emailing people in, or remotely in your industry (Real Estate Agent - property lawyer, house insurance, home inspector, etc.) and suggesting how useful this article might be to their clients.
3. Placing article on Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook hoping some news companies see it, and pick it up.
4. Looking on Haro (http://www.helpareporter.com/) to see if anyone is writing about your topic, and needs a source.
5. Searching for your exact topic in Google, and finding incomplete resources.  Ask them for links
6. Make friends in some news departments, try get them to link to you (give them a couple stories every once in a while, and they will help you out).

This really depends on the difficulty of your keywords.  If the market is very competitive, then don't expect to rank in the top three very quickly with a brand  new domain (it can be done, but it would take a lot of planning with link bait, and amazing execution of social media).  However, if you are in a relatively easy vertical, you could end up ranking twice in the same search (bonus!).

I would suggest:

Using the old domain

301'ing, or reusing any highly linked pages

submitting a new sitemap

Gaining a bunch of links to urge re-crawling

Having a sit down with the client before to explain possible short term ranking drops (Which sucks! They don't want to understand why)

Not checking the rankings every 30 minutes if drops occur.

I was under the impression that it was always best to use the / at the end of the domain when linking, etc. Is this not the case?

Either way is fine.  However, I choose to use the no "/" pages rather than the "/" pages.  I do this because I get more links pointing at my site without the "/," and I want to retain as much link juice as possible.

Also, when you do a redirect I was under the impression that the link juice from the redirected page would be passed on to the page it is redirected to. Is this not the case?

A portion of it does pass.  I've heard as high as 90% passes on.

I deleted some of those redirects but left the /down-syndrome-1 there...I have no idea how a url was generated with the -1 at the end, but it did.  So i left it there (I may need to do something with that.)

Is it an exact duplicate of another page?  If so, redirect.

Are you utilizing a "canonical" tag on the pages you want to be the "true" source?  As it, using the "canonical" to say, "hey, this is the original!"

I didn't even check how competitive it was, but good point!

The best practice is to not let your internal search get indexed.  Use no-index,follow so that Google can follow any links on the page, but doesn't place your search pages in the index.

Reason why: duplicate content

How different is a search for "kitten" going to be from the search "kittens" on your website?  Probably pretty exact.  However, they will possess two different url's.  Ta-da!  Duplicate content!  Not to mention:

Kittie, Kitty, Kitties, cute kittens, funny kittens, black kittens, grey kittens, cat, cats, etc.

For proof, go check out your google analytics, how many different ways are people finding you right now?

Incorporate some of the same words, but you will want to focus on a more direct point as you go through the subs.

Widgets/red-widgets/cool-red-widgets/

This will aid in both SEO and user experience.

Matt Cutts claimed that they do not count some links just last month (Pubcon).  So, they can decide not to if the other site (not yours) is of too low of quality.

Unless the page is over-optimized for the term.

@Dylan

What's your percentage of exact keyword match?  How long has the keyword been down?  When was the last time your site was indexed?  Have you searched for duplicate content on the web?  When is the last time you updated the page?

Are you a business that people are going to want to interact with?  Oddly enough, people aren't too keen on liking a Car Dealership (my business), but I have seen other companies get followers.

My favorite example of engagement is a company that does it's troubleshooting through Facebook.  If someone has a problem they post it on Facebook, and get it answered right away.  Every other company I see has to run some sort of competition, but this company (Schedulicity - I think that's how it's spelled), just had to be a great resource.

Write the be all end all resource for each of those topics, citing your sources (as long as they have a high authority level).  Don't try sell yourself within the article, just write it about the topic.  Then, ask other people in your field to review your resource, and see if they would suggest making any changes.  After you have made a couple alterations, ask them if they would link to your resource from their website.

Then, do some "inurl:".edu" life coaching" searches to see if there are any universities talking about the subject.  Send an email to a professor in that department asking them to link to your resource.

Don't focus too much on exact keyword match, just get them to link to it.

These deep links will help with your overall domain authority, which puts you at an edge to rank overall.

I like doing "intitle:"city" directory" searches.  such as: intitle:"Boise" local directory

Another search I would use is: intitle:"links" life coaching.  You can find some resource pages from people, and try get a link on them.

Thirdly!

Write all your local information in Schema (schema-creator.org).  I've only done this with four sites, but I've had good results with it.

Is it pointing at the exact same page you are on?  If so, you are fine.

It's in your Webmaster Tools.  You can suggest which ones you want to appear down there, if you get the option for a particular search.  However, just because suggest it doesn't mean it will happen.

Ryan Kent always has an awesome explanation for this type of scenario, so hopefully he drops in.

Anyway,

As long as you have it organized properly you should be able to make an attempt at ranking any phrase you want (I say attempt since you still have to optimize after creating the site).

I've ready a couple of Ryan's posts about the reasons for using /folders or subdomains, but I can't seem to find them right now.

Domain.com/Movies/Best-Movies-of-all-time

Domain.com/training/Doggy-Pushups

Are you currently using Canonicals?

This is in your own website's search, right?

I've always heard that you should do on page robots that make it:

no-index, follow

So that all of the links on the page can be followed, but Google will not index it.

If you have a very fast website, and a decent amount of content within each tab, you could have each tab be it's own page.  Everything will look the same to the user, but you can optimize for that specific tab.  However, this will not work if you have a slow website.

Otherwise I would suggest making each tab it's own individual page.

Contact all the webmasters that linked to your blogspot blog, and ask them to change the link over to your website since the resources will no longer be there?