The joys.... good luck!

I haven't come across this issue before so can't comment on which alternative but I'd be looking for Google's best practice and select one from there (from Google dev website or perhaps Matt Cutts has covered this in a video).

It seems interesting that your dev team could use an alternative like ~ or + but not (-) a hyphen. Maybe push back for the use of a hyphen!

I've found it interesting reading this thread and seeing 'these' links from a different point of view. When auditing client sites I always recommend removing the web designers link from the footer (or at least from the homepage) because that link doesn't help my clients.

If you are trying to get a link from the client it is going to be much better for you if the page is thematically in line with your website. You'd need to think creatively for this because I'm sure if they had web design ability they wouldn't need your services so similar content will be tricky! A couple of ideas: Perhaps your clients have a section/page of 'random' information where you can supply a paragraph of text about your website and add the link there. Perhaps they have a cool graphic or infographic that you created and they wouldn't mind adding a paragraph under it in smaller font? Perhaps you could do a contra deal, a page about you for 2 hours labor.

But, to make a choice from your options a single homepage link is going to be more worthwhile than footer links and I wouldn't use the same anchor text for all of your links.

This won't help with the image question but you can see Google Property data in Google Analytics by going to:

Traffic Sources>Search Engine Optimization>Queries and then selecting the secondary dimension of 'Google Property'.

I go to Google Image search (http://images.google.com/) and then do a site search and then look through each image, e.g. do this in the search field
site:www.yourwebsite.com

If the website has thousands of images indexed and it's not possible to look through all entries then do the site search and then add a word from the file name e.g. like this
site:www.yourwebsite.com pillow

Alternatively, post the image URL and I or someone else here can check for you!

Agreed, if you are keyword stuffing this could have a negative effect. I have seen individual frames indexed before so I'd recommend just using an image, plus it's less development time.

It's really important that you add a permanent 301 redirect from http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm pointing to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com (as mentioned by Marisa). Otherwise SEO goodness can be split between the two domains making it harder for you to get the sites ranking.

At the moment the homepage is accessible via 4 URL versions:

http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/
http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm
http://cascadevillagehotel.com/
http://cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm

ALSO, when you send the request you should also be requesting that a 301 redirect is also placed on the non-www URL version pointing to its respective www URL version - you'd want to have this done for every page e.g. http://cascadevillagehotel.com/hotel should redirect to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/hotel

Note - I often have the same discussion with web developers, from their point of view it is the same page and I understand that but you just need to state that Google treats it as multiple versions (do some research are canonicalization).

You could use something like Tweetdeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/ (or something similar) and be logged into multiple accounts at the same time.

As long as your content is well structured amongst the sub-domains and root domain I can't see why there would be any issues. When making the change ensure that you:

1. Tell Google that the URL is moving (do this via Google Webmaster Tools)
2. Add permanent  301 redirects from the old URLs and point to their respective URLs on the new domain (this is to ensure that any backlinks the old websites had will pass some link juice through)
3. Don't stop hosting the old domains for say 6 months.
4. Run a backlink check on the old URLs and try get those websites (provided they are of good quality) to update the link to the new sub-domain. For those that don't update the 301 redirect will help.

Have fun!
Davinia