Welcome to the Q&A Forum

As long as these links are editorial given and are coming from good domains, I think there should be a lot of benefit in them. Of course links from related domains are better (if only for referral traffic), but I personally don't think they'll be devalued or be seen as manipulative.

Spammy links will often have a low Moztrust and a medium  or high Moz rank. Sites penalised by Google can often be spotted if there is a considerable difference between Moz Rank and Page Rank. Hope this helps.

It would depend on two things. 1. did they received your email? 2. Did they even bother opening and reading your email at all? If you're able to satisfy the ones above then chances are you are almost 50% in having a good link.

I would be very hesitant to do something like this. If you want to link to something, use a followed link. If you don't trust it, don't link to it. Worrying about "reciprocity" of links in this fashion shouldn't be a concern for users or for search engines. Websites and pages link back and forth to each other all the time - it's a natural activity. It only gets troublesome when you intentionally try to manipulate rankings using "reciprocal link lists" (and I think that's why the word "reciprocal" in linking/SEO has become so maligned and misunderstood). This WB Friday might help - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-sitewide-reciprocal-and-directory-links

I can not see a average sized image being a load time problem. but as joe said make sure you use the alt tag

They sure can, try searching in Google for: ~SEO You'll notice that even the phrase "search engine optimization" is emboldened, as Google knows it is a synonym. Alan makes some good points, and I agree 100% about not making the text read clearly; websites are for people first. However, sometimes making it read clearly means using synonyms or secondary target keyword phrases. I'd say if you are targeting a single keyword then maybe it isn't so important, but with phrases of 3 words or so then the secondary phrases or phrase synonyms it does become more important if you want to target those search terms also.

Meta Descriptions are not used for rankings, so you would be fine by just changing out the state. However, I feel it's a great strategy and best practice to handwrite every meta description to insure the best conversion rate and CTR possible.