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This looks like BBCode, not HTML. Nofollw is an atribute for the anchor tag in HTML code. You won't be able to nofollow a link in BBCode unless you have a mod installed or nofollow all your links in your forum settings.

Hey Diane, my advice:

First of all, if you are just trying to optimize the homepage for "lifestyle magazine", I would take out all the extra keywords from your title:

"Lifestyle Magazine | In2town".

The reason I would include the brand name is because Google is increasingly looking at identifying brands as a ranking signal. I would also include your brand name in all the titles in your site, so "Article Name | In2town". You want Google to see you as the definitive brand for this category.

Secondly, I notice that your site is only PR3. When I search for "lifestyle magazine", all the top sites are PR4-6. This is a fairly competitive keyword. You need to get higher authority links if you want Google to see you as an authority.

Thirdly, do everything you can to make your site the best in its category. Is your site really the best lifestyle magazine out there? If not, why should Google rank you #1? Increasingly it is becoming more difficult to "game" Google because they look at things like social shares, user metrics, etc. The best way to attain these metrics is to have an awesome site that users will rave about and generate these signals.

Finally, while it can feel good to rank for head terms like "lifestyle magazine", you will probably find that people searching for the term may not be your highest converting traffic. The traffic is not even that high. It's probably a better strategy to rank for hundreds of terms related to having a great lifestyle than ranking for the broad "lifestyle magazine" term.

The blog you left a comment on is nofollow, which means it has little to no SEO value.

Honestly, comment links may have some value, but it's almost never worth your time if you are just doing it for link building purposes. There are dozens of link building tactics you could be using that will have a much bigger impact on your rankings. Here is a good list of ideas:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

It can take a while to show up in Analytics if you just connected the accounts.

I don't believe this is an ad. This seems to work on a number of sites I've looked at, including CNN, Fox News, and Search Engine Land (but not SEOMoz).

I took a look at the Open Graph tags for the sites, but didn't see anything out of the ordinary, and I haven't been able to replicate it with my site. Definitely something to keep an eye out for.

Again, if you are working on an existing site, see what people are using to link to you already, and go with the one people are using more.

If it's a brand new site, go with whatever you feel is best, just be sure to be consistent and ensure that external sites are using your chose url structure.

It doesn't really matter from an SEO perspective which one you choose, as long as you are consistent about it.

If you are working on an existing site, look to see which version of the URL people are linking to you with. If everybody is linking to the www version of your site, then go with that. As much as possible, make sure that people link to you with the canonical version of the url.

My personal preference is for www.

It's always a good idea to keep Wordpress updated to the latest version. Because Wordpress is open source software, the code is available to everyone, which means hackers can use it to discover new vulnerabilities. Once hackers discover a vulnerability in a version Wordpress, they can easily target all blogs running that version to exploit that vulnerability.

The longer you go without updating Wordpress, the more you leave yourself vulnerable to getting hacked. You are going to have to update PHP and Wordpress eventually, so why not do it now?

Are you using Google Webmaster Tools? You will generally receive a warning if you are being penalized for unnatural linking:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Google Webmaster Tools also has a "disavow link" tool, which allows you to tell Google which of your links are poor quality links you don't want counted against you. You can also try reaching out to the sites that you received the low quality links from, or contact the people who provided you with the fiverr gigs to see if they can remove the links.

If you didn't have much of a backlink profile to begin with, it may be easier to just start with a clean slate and start a brand new site that doesn't have all those spammy links.

It may make sense to have separate sites for the different countries since Google does favor country specific TLDs for searches within a country.

The best practice would be to use subfolders.

Subdomains (nj.site.com) are treated by Google in many aspects as separate sites, so the domain authority from nj.site.com won't transfer to say ny.site.com. You would basically have to duplicate your SEO efforts across 50 subdomains and not benefit from having one strong domain authority site.

Different domains (site-nj.com) would be the same problem, except you would also have to pay for 50 different domain name registrations. Plus, Google has devalued exact match domains so that having keywords in the domain doesn't carry quite as much ranking benefit as it used to.

Bottom line, go with subfolders for the optimal SEO site structure.

Linking to low quality sites can harm your site, especially if they are considered "bad neighborhood" sites such as porn, pills, and casinos.

That being said, if you think this site is of high quality and believe they will eventually grow in domain authority, by all means link to them. Every site has to start somewhere. Just be aware that Google judges the character of your site by the sites that you associate with, so choose who you link to wisely.

I don't think it makes sense to have star ratings on a testimonials page, the reviews should appear on the page about the product of service being reviewed, so all the reviews about Lawn Care should appear on your page about Lawn Care.

In general, what Google is looking for is reviews of your product that people have left on your site. Taking reviews from other sites and placing them on your site could be considered duplicate content (although Google themselves do this, go figure).

The semantic markup code you wrote above looks fine, just be sure to put a space where you put "itemscopeitemtype" (it should be "itemscope itemtype") and it should work properly.

It doesn't really matter what you're use, as long as you're consistent and get people to link the right version.

The only problem is that subdomains (blog.domain.com) are treated as separate sites by Google in many respects. So even if you get a lot of links to blog.domain.com, that link value may not pass on to your main domain. Including links from your subdomain to your main site can help you to get some of the link value over to your main domain.

What keyword are they using to link to you? Have you noticed that your rankings have dropped for that keyword? If it's an exact anchor text match keyword, you could consider asking them to change it to your brandname, but again only if you believe that link is negatively impacting you.

It also depends on how robust your link profile is. If you already have thousands of links, then 1 site with a sitewide link probably won't impact you that much, compared to if you have a relatively small link profile.

User behavior on your site is definitely a ranking factor, although no one can say exactly how large it is. It is theoretically possible to manipulate this, but it is perhaps not as easy as you make it seem.

You would need multiple people clicking in from different computers and different IPs. Also, Google doesn't just look at CTR, but time on site and how the user interacts with your site, so your contractors would need to act like actual visitors to your site. Then this would need to be done with enough volume to actually make a difference. Maybe that's not so difficult with a low search volume term, but good luck trying to make a meaningful difference on a high volume term. And again, no one knows how big of an impact user behavior has, or exactly what user behavior metrics are counted.

So it's possible in theory, but difficult in practice. You'd probably see a higher ROI spending your resources creating new content or building links, and just having an awesome site that results in positive user behavior.

I believe Matt Cutts once said that the backlinks in GWT are updated every 3 months or so. I'm not sure if the frequency has been changed since then. I don't know how often OSE updates.

It's best to keep track of your own backlinks. As long as the page that the link is on has been indexed by Google, then it is likely already being taken into account from the algorithm's perspective.

Have you received any warnings in Google Webmaster Tools or seen a drop in ranking for keywords that are targeted in the sitewide links? If not, I would not remove any links, as they could be passing link juice. If you ever receive a link warning, then I would consider disavowing or removing links at that time.

As long as the content from the books isn't available anywhere else, then you can definitely get more search traffic to your site by posting that unique content.

Whether you want to convert your books to HTML format depends on how much resources you have. My feeling is that having snippets or summaries of the books online in a blog format would work best, since most web searchers aren't looking to read an entire book when they search for content online. A snippet of the chapters along with a link to purchase the book could both increase search traffic and drive book sales.