The images on your page should be relevant to your pages content, so describe them with an alt tag naturally will add relevance. The length is not important, but I would not stuff they will a long list of keywords.

Links don't have to be relevant, its not to say that non-relevant links don't carry any link juice at all, but it is better to have relevant ones.

But I doubt that this guys links have any benefit at all. And if he is using some black hat schema to get these links, then one day that link network maybe or already discovered and you may get a penalty.
This happened in the past where a large number of link networks that sold links were put out of business overnight.

Get him to remove all the links and get rid of him.

sometimes it is better to get a new domain and start again. And do not 301 old domain to your new one.
There are things to consider before doing so, but it sounds like to me your links are crappy,, and who knows what else they have done.

Take a copy of the htaccess file, if something goes wrong, then you can always go back

No,
it is because you are pointing sales to a different sever, it seems to me that you don't have your dns set up correctly. you don't want sales pointing to your main website.

The logic I used is like this.

rather than have a rules like
If wearing jeans, you must wear the school uniform
If wearing hoodie, you must wear the school uniform
If wearing a thong, you must wear the school uniform
If naked, you must wear the school uniform

you only need one rule
If not wearing school uniform, you must wear the school uniform

in htaccess "!" means not so try this

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

also when using regex special chars like "." should be escaped with "" see above www.domain.com

Ok, I think I understand a bit better, you don't have a blog?
Then I would remove the dns record for blog, if you cant do that then yes you could 301 redirect

You can do this in one redirect following the logic
if not www.domain.com then redirect to www.domain.com

Sorry missed the bit about blog.
obviously blog.domain.com should not 301 to www
it should point to the correct site, then all reports and google will sort themselves out.

so add one more step, test that blog does in fact resolve to the correct site

You need to point your cname to the ip of the server that hosts your sales.domain.com

don't

sales.domain.com > domain.com

Do

sales.domain.com > 123.123.123.123

where 123.123.123.123 is the ip of the hosting webserver.

All links consume link juice even nofollow links.
What happens to the link juice is the question, does href="#" just flow back to the same page, first thoughts are yes, but then if that is the case, you would be able to manipulate how much link juice flows out of other links but adding more. so I think they may waste link juice. JavaScript links use link juice and there is no guarantee that Google is able to pass that link juice on.

A lot of CMS use this type of links href="#" on a A tag then use the A tag for some other reason, such as a button to fire JavaScript. I believe that if you want a button use a button, if you want a JavaScript link then attach the event to a SPAN or DIV, use A tags only for real links and be sure you know what is happening to your link juice.

I would agree with you. You have to ask yourself why do we have a blog. i find many people have one but dont know how or if it is helping them. Why have one on a different domain? To give links to your main site? Then why reciprocal link back to it? If your blog can attract a handfull of links under the same domain, it would out-weigh any links from your own blog on a seperate domain. (hope that makes sense)

I think having the blog in a subfolder or subdomain is the best use, you stand to gain links and traffic and you can use these pages to funnel PR to your home and landing pages, see link
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

As others have stated, its a bit in your face to the user.

May i suggest rather then a pop-up, just insert it somewhere un-obtrusive, after a few seconds, a simple bit of movement is all that is needed, and it would not stop the user from reading your content

no not like a noindex. more like a merge.

will it make you rank for many keywords? not necessarly, as a page all about blue widgets is going to rank higher then a page has many different subjects including blue widgets.

A canonical is really for duplicate content, or very alike content.

So you have to decide what your page is, is it duplicate or alike content, or is it unique?

if the pages are unique then do nothing, let them rank. if yopu think they are alike, then use a canonical. if there are only a few, then i would not worry either way.

if you decide they are unique, they I would look at making the page title unique also, maybe even description too.

good to hear that i am not alone.
I can avoid a job day after day after day. but once im on my way, the sun comming up tells me its time to quit

i would not get reciprocal links, Search engines look for un-natural patterns of linking, although they happan natrualy somtimes, SE's can see not only your pattern but those you have reciprocal links with.
But having said that, you are on the right track, link out on a page with low PR, include a load of links back to your own site so that you only give away a small percenatge of link juice.

No imposible, but you are correct you could spend a lot of time and money trying. but depending on the keyword being below them is not so bad.

If your keyword was lawnmowing, then someone wanting their lawns mowed would skip wikipedia and the .gov and go to you, but if the keyword was Founding Fathers, then where better then wikipedia to get info.

yes, but they should be noindex,follow so that the link juice flows back out of the pages, if no index,nofollow then the link juice will be lost

If you no index a page, link juice will flow to that page still. if you no follow it, it will still flow but will not flow out of it again.

you should always add noindex,follow if you want the link juice to return to your index pages. Even then some link juice will be lost that stays on that noindex page

I tried also could not find it. but here is a quote from Matt Cutts "Eric Enge:  Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts:  A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge:  So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts:  Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won't be showing in our Index.  So, I wouldn't make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end.  You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.

Eric Enge:  Another example is if you have pages on a site with content that from a user point of view you recognize that it's valuable to have the page, but you feel that is too duplicative of content on another page on the site

That page might still get links, but you don't want it in the Index and you want the crawler to follow the paths into the rest of the site.

Matt Cutts:  That's right.  Another good example is, maybe you have a login page, and everybody ends up linking to that login page.  That provides very little content value, so you could NoIndex that page, but then the outgoing links would still have PageRank.

Now, if you want to you can also add a NoFollow metatag, and that will say don't show this page at all in Google's Index, and don't follow any outgoing links, and no PageRank flows from that page.  We really think of these things as trying to provide as many opportunities as possible to sculpt where you want your PageRank to flow, or where you want Googlebot to spend more time and attention."

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml

There is no ideal length, its more like writing a play, its not the length of the play that makes it a success, its how well you portray the story, how you set the stage how you identify the charatures