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There is nothing wrong with EMD domains, as long as you're not being spammy. Having your keywords also helps with link building, since people will link to you using your keywords as anchor text.

EMDs can still be brandable if you're smart about it.  Look at searchengineland.com for example, or seotools.net.  A domain name should say what the site is about, and sometimes that means having and EMD.

There is no duplicate content penalty for images. Image buttons are fine unless you're really trying to optimize for speed, in which case coded buttons could be the better solution.

It's unlikely to be harmful since you're not doing anything malicious or misleading.

Vimeo Pro can work. Here are some good resources to make sure you are embedding the videos properly:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/video-seo-tactics-to-get-ranked/

What do you mean by getting your video indexed? If you mean showing up as a rich snippet, generally YouTube & Vimeo videos will not show up as rich snippets for your site, you need to host them on your own server. Occasionally, Google will display a video snippet even if the video is from YouTube, but this works with iframed videos as well.

5xx errors refer to server errors, and can be caused by serious issues with the way your server is configured.  I would definitely look investigate it further.

You can turn it off, just click on the pencil icon in the settings: http://i.imgur.com/EbxExC3.png

Seeing if the page where your link will be placed is indexed by Google is a good thing to check, as well as the PageRank of that page.  It's probably not worth paying for a listing if you're going to end up on some deep listing with no PageRank.

Probably the best directories out there are DMOZ, Yahoo, and BOTW.  Those as well as any niche specific directories and business directories. Beyond that it's probably not worth spending money or time on.

Hey Samantha, having text in rollovers should not  be an issue unless you are deliberately being spammy or trying to trick Google about what your page is about.

Modern web design incorporates many design elements that are hidden until the user interacts with them, such as: drop down menus, sliders, contextual help, slideshows, etc. Google understands that these are legitimate ways of presenting content to users, and not a blackhat tactic to spam keywords.

There's always the chance that hiding text could inadvertently trip Google's spam filters, but many of the most popular websites incorporate these design features, and the risk should be minimal.

I think it's still a fine way of getting links, as long as you're not overdoing it.  Instead of spamming anchor text links in the footers like a lot of companies do, you could try just having a link on the homepage, or have them write a blog post about your company with an in-context link.

Sorry, I meant to say subdirectory (domain.com/site). With a subdirectory your new site will benefit from the domain authority of your old site, and your old site will benefit from any links you build to the new site. If you have 2 separate sites, you will be increasing the amount of link building you have to do, but there could be other benefits like branding, risk diversification, etc.

If you put the new site in a subdomain, it will benefit from the domain authority of your current site.  However, if all your content is behind a paywall, you won't be able to drive any SEO traffic to it.

It's probably not worth it to contact EVERY site, but it could be worth it to reach out to the highest value links, especially if you see a rankings drop after the move.  Export your backlinks and sort them by PA/DA, then contact the ones at the top of the list.

Are you talking about caching or crawling?  Caching is a resource intensive process, and most sites are not cached daily, not even ones that are updated daily (try searching for your favorite news site).

The links from the press releases themselves don't carry a lot of link value, although PRWeb has higher domain authority so might give you a slightly bigger boost.

The key is to get your press release picked up by high authority news sites and blogs, which requires having a newsworthy or interesting angle.  If your piece is really newsworthy, it can be more effective to e-mail newspapers directly.  Most new sites have a "tips" section where readers can submit news.  I've had some success directly e-mailing local newspapers with tips.

Sitewide links are generally believed to be of lower value than contextual links, and can even get you penalized post-Penguin.  They can still be good links to get when used in moderation, but best to mix them up with other link building tactics like guest blogging.

The pages should not show up at all once they are de-indexed.

Ok, sounds like a noindex,follow in the header is the best solution then.  That will keep the no-longer-existant pages from being indexed while still preserving any link juice the page may have acquired.

From a web design & usability, a lot of people use right side navigation because it is close to the scroll bar on most browsers/computers.  So people can easily access the scroll bar and use the navigation without having to drag their cursor all the way across the screen.

As far as SEO, Google will generally filter out boilerplate content like navigation, but if you have a lot of dynamic content in there, it can impact SEO as far as where you have the navigation in the code (above the content or below the content).  However, regardless of where you place the sidebar in your code, you can have it appear wherever you want using CSS.

Why are these parameters an issue for you?  Where are they getting linked from?  If it's from a high authority external site, it may make sense to 301 redirect them.  If they're just low quality sites, it's probably safe to ignore.