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either 301 redirect the link to new relevant content or update the dead links with proper URL's and quality content.  301 May be the must efficient if you're going to create new fresh content.

are you talking about versions of sites to see how old that particular website is or the domain?

obviously whois information is great for domains

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp

there is also a way to see old versions of websites here:

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Bing is actually providing their search results and ad on yahoo results pages.. they are now "bing powered"

PRweb is a decent tool, the problem is that it aggregates the news, but you dont get any real value from the Press Releases on the major outlets.  Do an actual search on the sites you are submitted to from PRweb and you wont find your releases in the results.   This is a big complaing about PRweb.  I recommend checking out businesswire.com for press releases. It is more expensive but offers real SEO benefits.  I used PRweb for a year and a half here at my company and recently switched and saw immediate dividends.

I worked for about 3 years in the mid 2000's on an ecommerce site with great SEO strengths.  Enough can't be said about choosing the right ecommerce platform.  There are quite a few to choose from, and choosing the wrong platform can create an uphill battle for SEO from the start.  The platform we used was X-cart.. it was amazing and had a lot of features and add-ons that made SEO a breeze... the draw back is that it's very expensive.  Magento IMO is a fantastic alternative to X-cart and fixes a lot of legacy issues that have crept up over time.  If I were you, I would avoid zencart and oscommerce, but once again that is just my opinion.

As for straight up SEO tips

• organize URLs to display categories and products correctly.
• enable caching to speed up website load times
• dont forget the alt tags
• avoid dupe content issues (best advice would be to never copy and paste descriptions on anything, always rewrite)
• enable reviews
• send product feeds to amazon, google, etc.

a few other tips on usability

• imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.  Fortune 500 companies have amazing budgets to figure out how to sell products,  check out their pages for inspiration.
• look at popular ecommerce sites online, see what they do right.  amazon, tigerdirect, victorias secret, etc. You'll find that simple is often the best way
• make the buying decision easy.  depending on your product, make the price and purchase button green.  that may be my best tip for you.. we saw about 15% higher conversions just by changing those two things.
• respond and interact with your customers ASAP a la woot.com

hope this helps.

AUguides.com would probably be the best one of of the available you've listed.  i'd avoid anything with two letters together a la venueexplorer.com  that being said the trends right now are for short unique bit.ly bizzy.com etc.  you might go back to the drawing board but I dont see anything wrong with AUguides.com  if you brand it correctly you could have something special .

Landing pages are always effective - especially for localized geo marketing.  If you want to do a physical address, you could always do a PO box or a UPS store box that will provide an "Address" location.  I am not sure if that is necessarily "ethical" but if you are offering the products in those cities, I don't think you'll encounter too much grief.  I wouldnt add the PO box or UPS Store address to google places, but you could create a landing page that would have a little more content on it.

a very quick review of your site showed some promise.  you have a section for case studies etc.. you can use case studies to garner industry expertise and link build from that.

Another great way to start adding content to any type of website is a blog.  if you were to add an industry specific blog to the site you could quickly start conversations with your b2b customers.  Remember to provide industry specific news and thought stewardship and you can help link / content build very quickly.  From there you can run some social twitter, fb, etc. and hopefully start growing links from that.  personally I dont see much room on fb for my b2b, but i still see a lot of growth on twitter.

one last thought is to work with your happy customers to provide back links or cross links to start building out some good linking techniques..

just a quick .02   Im sure others will have some great ideas too

A designer on my team who does freelance work on the side - based on complexity he would charge 300 - 600.  If it was more complex the price would obviously increase.  Dallas, TX estimate.

Id be curious to see what others would charge just to let him know if hes over or under priced.

I would say any traffic is good traffic as long as it is the correct traffic.  If someone is searching for something irrelevant and finding your website, then you should probably add a nofollow tag to tell the search engines not to look at the landing pages.  If it is relevant I dont see why you would want to remove it.  You might have a link to the specific landing pages under a "specials" section or whatever your value prop is that you're using on the landing pages.

I highly recommend http://splashmedia.com/  they're a local company that has a track record of success including i think 11+ emmys?  they are also affordable. I actually almost went to work for them, but the deal fell apart - that being said they're an amazing company for video

I dont know if a press release on an infographic is necessarily the best way to get it out there.  I'd recommend having high value content on an inforgraphic that is accessible to a large demographic.. then use champions in your industry to help promote it via social or partner websites.    obviously if you could get inbound links from clients sites that would help exposure and inbound seo.  Think social when you're contemplating about how to gain exposure with the infographic.  see if news sites in your industry would be interested in blogging or featuring it along with fb twitter and + promotion.

If you have business cards or flyers, you can also use QR codes, etc. to help distribute the infographic via print

I've done it on some websites and I havent on others.. It really depends on the design elements we've been incorporating.  I think if you can have the text there without a complete design overhaul that would be considered best practices, but I havent been penalized by google when I have done it with img tag.  I do believe that google doesnt pass as much juice through the alt tag though, so you'll have to be clever with your CSS.

I actually have similar questions about this.  The company I work for hosts a blog that is also syndicated across 4 to 5 other websites.  The other sites have bigger reach on the web and our blog isn't getting much direct traffic out of this.  I have a feeling adding the author tags to our content will eventually pay off to show that the content is being originated on our site and then syndicated.  I am interested / excited to see other ways this will be used.  I think its a great fix for the scraping issue and will hopefully prevent needing panda updates X.X

I agree with chris.. could provide specific examples.. It would help to find the cause of the problem.  Also, are you keeping the old pages and new pages accessible or have you removed the old pages?

I just wanted to chime in on the meta tag discussion.  For the most part, I incorporate some meta keywords in my landing pages as well - also for organization and interpretation as to what the page details.  Google (matt cutts) has specifically stated they don't follow meta tags in ranking - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Additionally,  your competitors will get a great idea of the keywords you're targeting if you include that information in your meta data.  While it isn't a "Secret" what you're trying to accomplish.. you may inadvertently give them part of your recipe - especially for longtail keywords

Be very consistent with your 301 redirects is my best advice. Last year we did a significant update in terms of content and otherwise to a new domain.  make absolutely sure you're sending as much content to the correct locations on the new domain and you'll be fine.  Avoid the trap of 301ing sub pages to the main domain url as much as possible.

You may have to resubmit your site through webmaster tools AFTER fixing the forementioned issues.