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As Ryan pointed out, I would only be concerned about the browser type-in visitors. The more popular your website will get, the more # of visitors you lose to your counterpart. If you are project is serious enough and if you can afford to get the .com, I'd go for that.

Yes it will definitely help as it will give some credibility - especially with newbies and businesses not very online savvy. Don't expect to learn and remember a lot from those tests....most of the learning will come from actual experience aka trial-and-error, online tutorials/blogs, forums & your peers.

Adding Google Analytics is not absolutely necessary but there could be a lot of advantages over your current analytics.
Since Google also provides a bunch of other tools  and services like PageSpeed, Adwords, it integrates rather pretty well with analytics and could potentially give you a better view.

Why not add it? It hardly takes any time to integrate (if you have a common page element) and it barely adds to site load time.

I tried finding a tool that would automate it for me sometime ago but didn't find it so I simply used excel.

I took a list of all major US states and cities and imported to one row. On the right row I used keyword that I wanted to combine with the geo term. Copy pasted both rows (geo+keyword) to get search count.  It took me 20 mins to do it all.

Also, if you select 'broad search' for  "music instrument rentals San Francisco" while finding the search count. you will get other search queries as well, like the one you mentioned:"Where to get Instrument rentals in San Francisco" + several other combinations

I usually just use Xenu's link sleuth (if you thousands of pages) to list out all the URLs you have and I would then manually check them, but I haven't come across an automated tool yet. If anyone knows any, I'd love to know as well.

Recommend the 2 points you mentioned. Of course, followed with a dose of good old backlinks and backed by some social signals as well.  Yes its more work but it will you see better ROI in the long run.

Also, echoing other users here, template is not an issue at all - its what you put on it - the content, titles and other meta tags that needs to be unique especially if you are a low-mid level authority. Very high level authority sites can get away with duplicate content as Google sometimes tends to blindly trust them over the original source.

Before you even start on trying to get links for the website, just ask yourself why others would link to you. You are an e-commerce website and it makes it even more difficult to get quality natural links - so being creative is important here - think of different strategies you can pursue so it makes your content more "linkable".

Could you provide any free tools or widgets that your readers might find useful? For a real estate guy, a free mortgage calculator might work well.

You could run a contest targeted towards women audience - have viral impact by social sharing  - this usually ends up with several links from "mom blogs" and other portals.

As James suggested, go for Directories - those are easy links - but make sure they are thematic and relevant. There are very few general directories of value.

I would listen to Ryan's advice.

The sites foundation (coding, on-page SEO) take priority over link building or any other different web marketing strategies. Once the foundation is strong, other strategies become much easier to execute - in your case,  if you get the off-page right, you will see much more returns from every link you will be earning.

Try Google's "Ad Preview tool".  Search for::Google "Ad preview too" ::: - it should be the 1st listing in Google

In that, enter the keyword phrase, select the country, and  you are good to go!

//Tried to include the link in this message but for some reason its not working when clicked on directly.

You can also try copy pasting this URL in new browser:
https://adwords.google.com/d/AdPreview/?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000

It is still important to some extent. If you intend to rank for "Chinese Burgers" but you are writing more about "Cheese" instead, Google will assume the page is more likely about "Cheese" than  "Chinese Burgers".  If you get some backlinks with the right variations of anchor text that includes "Chinese Burgers" in the phrase, that will solve Google's dilemma, but assuming no backlinks and no other external factors, keyword density is still pretty important.

I know this could be confusing (as I was not too long ago) as lot of 'experts' say its not important - just do your own little test with brand new domains and see what kind of difference it makes.

Its true however that there is no  magic "density" to this - just make sure you don't use some other keyword phrase more than your MEAT keyword phrase.

Really interesting that you ask this as I have just recently been researching on this exact same thing. A website where we had 4 H1 tags on homepage (not a good thing!) needed to change - to keep it to just 1. I did not want to introduce new keyword phrase and I struggled to find an existing keyword/title phrase that I could wrap the H1 with. For a sometime I was considering making the logo as H1 as the logo images ALT  had the websites main keywords in it but from research and non-scientific test on a dummy site, I found that its not very affective at all.

To some extent, the effect is like an image backlink - Google does not greatly value the ALT of the image that is linking to you, as it would, had the backlink been from a text link with anchor text.

If keywords are reversed or switched, the "bonus" effect is vanished to most extent but its still better off than a domain with no keyword at all. Having keyword in a domain does give you an advantage in terms of ranking at least in the short run. Its worth noting that Google has been reducing the weight of exact match keywords and also 'keywords' usage in domains in general.

In this case, there is nothing that needs to be done.. you are good to go but in future if there are too many bad links and you suspect negative SEO in play, and you think its affecting you, you may want to create are report and send it to Google with detailed explanation.

Hopefully, in future Google allows an option in webmaster tools where you could just go and 'flag' or 'disallow' any backlink that you think is bought by competition to get you down.

I wouldn't pay that amount even if it was a permanent listing. Certain Nofollows do pass juice and they are not completely useless but this one is not worth the investment considering the price.  Even if it was dofollow, just look at the worth of the page not just the root domain (which is not that great either).

Sounds like you are agreeing with me, Ryan.

As I mentioned, if you go overboard with "optimizing" you end up having a site that is not linkable or attractive enough for other people to link to you naturally, so although you will get traffic for using the keyword rich content, title, etc, you are getting it at the cost of future links. That's lacking a long term strategy.
I would never link to a website that looked too keywordy or spammy even if it wasn't one and I am confident there are many others like me.

That being said - if you have smaller "satellite" sites, and those sites are meant to cater to a specific niche and their main objective is to get traffic to your main website rather than create new leads/sales on their own, then its a different story - I would go for optimizing first in this case. I would make sure most keywords that I care for are covered. User experience is still important (or they'll bounce) but not as much as it is for your main MOTHER site.

Ask yourself this - is Google traffic of utmost importance or does user experience what matters most?

Its a vicious cycle.. if you "over optimize" your website, you may initially rank higher but will become less "linkable" to other resources. Also, it may get stunted or even bowled over by competition who converts much better than you.

I always go for user experience first unless my site couldn't live without organic traffic

It depends on the competition level for those keywords. If its high, you might want to focus on one mother keyword phrases and couple of child keyword phrases. Trying to rank for more than 1 keyword phrase in 1 page in a high competition scene is not something I'd suggest.

No issues at all.. have been using them for years

I am gonna vote up with 1 folder level. There is no evidence of it, but its possibly that the juice would not pass through as well if there are many directories/sub-directories