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I would rel=canonical all versions of the page to point to one without querystring. You only want one page to be indexed.

I would also (sorry) reconsider your ties with a developer who wants to use inline CSS. That is just dumb...

I don't understand why you want the redirect at all?  Why not put the final content on the home page.

Regardless, I don't agree that 302 should be used in this circumstance (no matter what a "google employee" says!) - it's a "temporary redirect" - is this temporary?

IMO, all redirects should be there to fix a specific problem - stop 404's, fix canonical problems, etc.

I would pick hypenated over anything but .com. I would nt even use .net - .org is the only one I would consider for a true non-profit organisation.

I have some hyphenated domains for ecommerce websites, and have found no big problem with them personally.  Of course go with non-hyphenated .com's if you can!

The answer is almost always simple: more - and better - links.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

Larry, +1 to Mike's advice.  Press releases are the way to go with high quality content like this. I recommend PRWeb also. Have facebook and twitter accounts setup and primed before the first of the press releases.

Yes, I believe any http error response is a bad thing and could affect your ranking. Even 404's or 301's (when links on-site or in sitemap cause them) are cause for concern. You want to make your site as squeaky clean as possible.

I regularly use a site crawler to check my site, including sitemap/rss feeds, and fix any non-200 responses.

Linking from articles is still "worthwhile" - obviously don't spend a ton of time on it because it is still an internal link after all..

It's true that the first link to any given URL is the most important one - in other words there is no point in linking twice or more to the same place from a single page. This is a common problem with category pages that use a product image to link to the product first - it should be second (at least in the markup).

Now, to answer your question - yes, add links in the content part of the page (not header/footer/sidebars) to pages that you want to receive some love. Content links are the most powerful. Link from articles to product categories and/or product detail pages.

Do they or you have in-house developers? If so, going the open-source route will give them huge advantages over time when you want to modify the CMS. I wrote my own CMS years ago and I'm still finding things to improve - and many of my competitors with their OOTB CMS cannot keep up with changes.

Send links to the new (ugly) URL. Consistency is critical, all links to the same content must use the same URL. The actual URL is less important; more a "would be nice" rather than a "must have"

Agreed; I haven't read anything yet that the new tags/attributes have any effect at all in SEO terms

Acquiring links at a consistent rate is more sustainable; I've also heard (but cannot personally prove) that you should gradually grow links to make the link growth more natural - i.e. sudden spikes in growth may trigger some adverse reaction from SE's.

Personally, I think there are many natural reasons for spikes too - some event like a product launch, natural disaster or even something like being mentioned on the 10 o'clock news that I wouldnt worry about it.

But scaling up your link building sure makes it easier to build your systems and processes, adding more link building methods over time. You can't come out of the gate and expect to build a million backlinks in a month. At least not ones that will matter.

You should always link to the authorities in your niche anyway in my opinion. That shows google what network you are a part of..

Sounds like you should just pick the way the CMS renders them, upper case. And just redirect any lowercase/mixedcase to that?  As I said, it doesnt matter at all which you pick - but everything on your site must match.

1.8mb is HUGE, what on earth is in there? I have a full background complex image for one of my websites - it's 90kb. Even the biggest CSS sprite image I have is just 30kb that includes most of my site template.

I recommend that you revisit this and use a different image format if not jpg/png/gif - for example never use tif or BMP online.

A background this size will really look poor to your first time visitors - this is exactly why Google want to start using speed as a ranking factor.

Are these URL's to categories/folders or product detail pages? Generally you'd expect the trailing slash on folders only, e.g.

/foldera/
/foldera/producta

The sitemap must match the exact URL's used on the site obviously - I would expect a slight penalty if your URL's in sitemap cause a redirect. That would be sloppy.

Having said all this, consistency is key - not necessarily whether there are slashes or not. You must be careful though that whichever someone uses (and they'll link to you both ways) you always redirect to the same style.

If you have the money spare - which it sounds like you don't - I would get a BOTW link, but only if the category you are interested in is indexed. I've bought Yahoo directory links too in the past but to be honest I wouldnt recommend either to someone on a limited budget. Of course, "limited" is a relative term. These links cost a few hundred bucks each - enough to get 20-40 good quality unique articles written and used for better purposes..

If you're looking for truly apache mod_rewrite stories I cannot help, but I have implemented site-wide redirect schemes so that (for example) all URL's are put into Title Case, all folders are redirected to ensure trailing slash, and much more.

It made a big difference and is highly recommended. Our duplicate content (that google wasnt even reporting but that we saw with tools like the IIS SEO toolkit http://www.iis.net/download/seotoolkit) dropped to zero and shortly afterwards our traffic increased as a result of increased keyword ranking almost across the board.

Too many people ignore this.

There is just no way that Google could get away with this - a clear conflict of interest and they would be sued into bankruptcy. They keep these divisoins so seperate it's crazy - when we were talking to them recently about use of their adwords API they yet again confirmed that they have no knowledge of organic position or traffic..

Agree with everything said above, but will add that https does have small extra overhead, so will make your server work harder and the site slower; very minor but it's there and one reason why most reserve it's use the cart and checkout..