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I would personally place the keywords at the end for clarity. It indeed seems unnatural to have the id as the final part of the URL. Even if that does indeed cost you a tiny bit of 'keyword power', I would glady sacrifice that in exchange for a more user-friendly URL.

Limiting the amount of words in the URL does indeed make it look slightly less spammy, but slightly less user friendly as well. I guess this is just one of those 'weigh the pros/cons and decide for yourself'. Just make sure the URLs don't get rediculously long.

I'm afraid I can't give you any specific number to aim for. Perhaps there is somebody else with experience on what a truly natural amount of new links is for your type of website (which we don't know yet by the way)?

What you could try to look at: Would (any) of these links have occured if it wasn't for your manual effort? Without your effort, at what rate would this particular domain have acquired links?

For example: if this is a site about one specific type of highly niche screwdrivers, it would be far less likely to attract a significant number of backlinks per day than a tech blog that regularly has big scoops.

In my opinion this should be far more focussed on what a visitors wants to see here instead of what a search robot should encounter.

Make sure your main navigation is search engine friendly (no images, flash, javascript etc) so that all your main pages are linked there. You could choose to link to some of your latest or best articles (to show your visitors that your website is up-to-date), include some testimonials (to show you're credible). Perhaps in your footer you could include some partners (keep it natural), your privacy policy and terms of use?

Try asking your usability testers what they think should be on the main page and work from there.

I would personally go for the structure provided by mediAvatar. This one clearly indicates what type of item we're viewing, and enables users to 'chop off' a part of the URL to get to the index page of that particular category.

However, many big boys including for example Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/What-Every-BODY-Saying-Speed-Reading/dp/0061438294/) and My Wedding Favors (http://www.myweddingfavors.com/key.html) have chosen your structure, which of course has clear benefits of its own (such as a far shorter URL).

You could use enviromental variables (for example in your env.ini or config.ini file) that are set to DEVELOPMENT, STAGING, or LIVE based on the appropriate environments the code finds itself in.

With the exact same code, your website would either be limiting IP addresses (on the development environment) or allow all IP addresses (in the live environment). With this setup you can also set different variables per environment such as the level of detail that is shown in your error reporting, connect to a testing database rather than a live one, etc.

[this was supposed to be a reply, but I accidentely clicked the wrong button. Hitting 'Delete reply' results in an error.]

This one might be a bit outdated, but it contains some great directories: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

Yes it would, though in this case you're the original source and all their websites are linking back to your website to attribute the original content to you.

The republising of articles is a common practice, so I wouldn't worry to much about the 'duplicate content' aspect of this situation if I were you.

I'm afraid a slight miscommunication has happened. The website MyWeddingFavors isn't mine (I wish!) but was simply an example I used.

That aside, yes, you would have to do some 301 redirects, but I don't see that as a problem if it greatly improves both the user friendliness and the structure of the website as perceived by the search engines.

From what I know that website performs really well in the search engines for both long and short tail keywords, which would indicate that once set up well, both structures can perform good in the search engines.

You can't 'quickly' raise your PA/DA in a legit and normal way.

Aside from the caps that Google is said to have on your allowed growth/time, raising these values requires high amounts of backlinks from strong domains. Focus on creating top quality content that your target audience wants to read, share and link to. A higher PA/DA will follow.

I wouldn't worry too much about a couple of bad backlinks. Like you proposed yourself I would just go after many more quality backlinks which will make these couple of bad links just another part of your natural link profile.

Added to the above is the fact that I recall Matt Cutts saying that incoming links can never hurt your rankings (assuming they aren't part of some kind of bigger link scheme), unfortunately I can't seem to find the source for that quote anymore.

No worries!

You should change the meta refresh to a real 301 redirect for example using htaccess or PHP.

You can learn more about this topic here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

If you visit the pages yourself and the website shows the correct (new) title in the title bar and address bar of your browser, Google will find out sooner or later and start using the new titles and URLs. Patience is all it takes!

As long as you keep it natural and view it more as a source of traffic rather than SEO metrics, you should be fine posting on forums, blogs, guest posts, etc.

No. Actual text is slightly more effective than an image alt text. You might want to have a look at CSS image replacement techniques?

I agree with Nicholos. Even though it probably won't hurt your rankings (perhaps a little in loading time or by placing your keywords further down the code), I would indeed put the code in a separate .js file. This way the users' browsers will cache the code as well, speeding up the website in the process.

You seem to already be logged in. You can click on the icon of the person (with the fancy lines next to it) in the top right corner to see your data. If you were logged out, a 'Log In' button would be visible.

I personally don't think that changing your URL as you described will result in big increases in rankings on the organic search. Especially considering the work required (and the potential loss of incoming links to URLs you forget to redirect), I wouldn't recommend the change you've described.

If however, you really want to change the URLs, this is the structure I'd advice:

www.example.org/category-name/123-product-name

This allows people to cut a piece of the URL and land of your category overview page, shows them to what category a product belongs and keeps the amount of 'sub levels' to a minimum by including the id in the second level.

Far, far more than 3kb. Somewhere halfway this blog (http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/41/does-source-code-ordering-still-matter-for-seo/) you'll find some references to sources on this same issue, they might be helpful for you.

There was very recent blog by Dr. Pete on the SEOmoz blog about this very subject, you might find it interesting:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-keywords-do-i-rank-for

Which 'tool' are you referring to exactly? If you don't know what these links are, most likely they are just spam bots trying to find security holes in your application, or links created by a plugin. Nothing to worry about most likely.