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http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml This is an excellent break down of the factors that go in to local search.  David Mihm is also on the SEOmoz website so if you need an expert in the field you can contact him.

As you can see from the article there are at least 58 positive indicators and 11 negative indicators that all influence your localized ranks, being a combination of localized content and regular ranking factors.  Hopefully by scanning through this article you'll be given several ideas of where you can improve your results.

Edit feature isn't working for some reason.  Forgot to add this link which is recent and useful: http://www.flavordesigns.com/2011/04/how-to-use-technorati/

Hi Prunarevic.  Can you clarify your question?  I'm a bit confused about what you're asking. Typical parasite hosting is accomplished by hacking into a website or finding an openly editable portion of a website and adding content that redirects to your target page.  It's not advisable, and if you break laws while hacking into someone's website it could be far more trouble than it'd ever be worth.

It's in the code so your developer would have to do it, from Google's Guide:

Can the link be relative or absolute?

The rel="canonical" attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

CrazyEgg--the heat mapping / user interaction site--wrote this blog post back in 2013: http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/08/12/reduce-your-bounce-rate/ with #7 being exactly what you're asking about, "Nothing’s worse than being blasted with background music or a voice when you’re not expecting it – especially if you’re at work or you have multiple tabs open and can’t figure out which one the sound is coming from!"  Many people do break time shopping / research while in the office so having an audio play video or song is almost a guaranteed bounce. CrazyEgg didn't put the stats up to go with this but they're certainly speaking from experience.

Hi Alan,
Are you still pushing Google News tagged XML sitemaps when publishing articles as well?  Looking at the ones currently on your site I don't see any new ones referenced since October 2014. And it looks like there's a lot of current mapping that could be updated.

In general the site seems a little low in the loop of the major news cycle and would have a lower crawl/index priority on big stories behind the CNNs, Foxs, and Yahoos of the world.

It also doesn't seem to be in the Google News index: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Anewsblaze.com#hl=en&tbm=nws&q=wolf+of+wall+street+site:newsblaze.com

Google's Guideline to Google News Publisher inclusion is straightforward, and fairly thorough. https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en  If you get included via those means, you should see your news articles appearing very quickly.

Google pulls reviews from across the web, not just Google accounts.

With modern mobile devices their screens are actually pretty good at displaying high resolution images, but responsive design still helps significantly in squeezing layouts into handy formats across platforms. The crew at Distilled wrote a nice post about this a couple of years ago that's still applicable, here: http://moz.com/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design.

There's a lot of shades of gray to this question. The more spam-like versions most likely would be discounted, while guest posts on strong websites would still drive link value. For example, if I wrote an article or story that was picked up by the mainstream news and placed on a site like ESPN, USA Today, NYT, etc. the link in the story would be valuable.

If the site that picked up my article or story was a paid repository of low quality content then the link would likely count for much less or could possibly be considered spam if the website was considered a bad neighborhood in regards to linking.

I haven't seen URL structures as a deal breaker when it comes to ranking, other than when it's full of session IDs, variable strings, and is a massively large URL.  Mostly I consider using folder names for tracking purposes and try to keep them short for the most part.  That way I can plug in a few to analytics and have a pretty good idea of that area of the site's performance.  SEOmoz wrote a great article on this type of analysis at: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-powerful-analytics-tip-every-website-should-employ

You could accomplish the same thing with URL naming convention, but a folder would give you a quick way to organize and allow you to use shorter URL names. Back to the SEOmoz example, their folder names are extremely short, and sacrifice keyword targeting for the sake of length.  As EGOL says, links are going to matter more than the word(s) in your folder name.

Ruth brings up a good point, autoplay can work when it's expected, but most sites aren't Youtube, Netflix, or Vimeo. Still if your site is in the category of "all we do is videos" then autoplay may work for you.

I've seen it disappear when using a Google from a different country, google.com.mx or google.ca for example...  Neither of these make the searches more generic however.

Also, be sure to have a user friendly 404 page.  404 is unavoidable due to typos, silliness and random acts of God, so it's always wise to have a highly functional page as a catchall for anything that you can't 301 redirect.

Examples
http://www.apple.com/gljasdlj
http://pages.ebay.com/gljasdlj
http://www.cnn.com/gljasdlj

It could add a bit of uniqueness, but probably not to the level of every word from the PDF being associated with the with the page that it's embedded on. Still, if the PDF is highly relevant to the page where it's embedded it's a positive factor for the page overall.

It's not really useless as there is page rank passed through most links on the web to some degree, it's just harder to classify what the image means in a keyword sense.  Also, if this is a banner link, there's likely to be a redirect script or discounted link value because you're paying for the placement anyways.

If you do acquire other image links though, having the image be in a table cell with related text nearby helps, having the image and text be part of the link also heps, if the image is in a div or other markup along with related text, that helps too... Basically anything that correlates the image to some text in a common web structure.  And of course, alt or title text.

Very minimal.  A 301 redirect is delivered via an HTTP status code which is the first thing to get crawled on a page.  there won't be any other server load other than sending it along it's way to it's new location.

Edit: To put this in other words, it's not going to be any worse than your IIS server having to deliver an additional 500 plus HTTP status code 200.

Hi Chris. Here's the Google Dev page on it: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/PreResolveDns

With the speed enhancement being, "DNS resolution time varies from <1ms for locally cached results, to hundreds of milliseconds due to the cascading nature of DNS. This can contribute significantly towards total page load time. This filter reduces DNS lookup time by providing hints to the browser at the beginning of the HTML, which allows the browser to pre-resolve DNS for resources on the page."

It's similar to preloading images that are going to appear on the next page clicked or scrolled to. The transition seems much faster when it's loaded while interacting with the first page. Cheers!

For internal linking you should try to be as precise as possible. You can also freely control the anchor text of the links so if you're talking about a specific product, link to that specific product. Google has enough data to know when you link to a page and the content it should be finding is not there (as may be the case with some of your home page links).  I would clean up any and all internal links that don't point to the best page, either deleting ones that just don't apply or pointing them to very specific products.

With external links it can vary. A lot of times people link to the home page when mentioning the company, while some sites garner a lot of product specific links (eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, etc.) due to the nature of their content. Wikipedia would be another example. Using OSE you can find some great ideas around how the competition has built links, but also some really spammy examples. Avoid the spam and make it a goal that when you do add a link to a page or work with someone interested in linking to your site, that the link is as user helpful as possible.  Think of the link or mention from a conversion perspective more than as a way to help your rankings and you'll be much better off. Cheers!

Solution #2: They should hire you as their SEO. 

Ah. As outlined above by EGOL the separate subscription model should do well. Plus you'll be keeping inbound links within the blog as a whole so that should help with gains.