Comments on our company's SEO strategy?

Hi all,
I'm new to the forum, and just wondered if anyone had any opinions on our company's current SEO strategy.

We're a bricks and mortar print company based in the UK and have been in business for about 8 years. We started to outsource SEO as soon as we had a basic website and it has been the single biggest factor in the 25% a year growth that the company has enjoyed, even through the current recession and credit crunch. We moved into new premises a year ago and now have 8 staff on the books. Our e-commerce site is excellent and is where most of our work comes from. We get around 500 visits a day, and this has increased over the last 5 years.

Around Christmas this year we started to look into the possibility of doing the SEO for ourselves, doing as much research and reading as possible into this vast and complex subject. This coincided with the Google update of 17th Jan that hit us quite hard for several of our key search terms. Our SEO company wanted to ignore this and keep building links (and taking our money) despite the fact that we knew that this was exactly what was causing the problem in the first place. We cancelled our contract with them and had an independent report done as to the cause of the drop. it turned out that it was mainly the metrics part of the update. The bounce rate for our print calculator pages was really high - people visit these pages, get a price quickly (it's easy to use!) and then click off. While this wasn't a problem - the page was actually doing a good job - Google saw this as a spam content indicator and slapped us accordingly. We changed this so that there is an intermediate landing page that requires a click through, and the bounce rate has quartered overnight. just recently the rankings seem to have stabilised and we are kind of back where we were.

As we'd cancelled the contract with our SEO company, we decided to grasp the nettle and begin to do our own at this time. We looked at SeNuke, and many of the strategies based around this, along with the Blogseries software. In the end we settled on our own blog network. We now have 15 Wordpress blogs, all hosted on a server that allows each blog to be on an IP address that is C class diverse, or better. This, and other methods, should mean that Google can't know that they all belong to us. Some of the domains are brand new, and some are bought in with higher pagerank. Some of tghe sites are just blogs, but quite a few are actually fully functioning e-commerce themes (they actually work!) and they are all well designed. We like to think that they would pass manual inspection.

We currently have a spreadsheet of search terms that we are working on. Every day I write 4x 400word articles that are posted to the blogs, spread out over time, and mixing up which blogs get done each day. We also do 2 blog posts each day from Repost. Each of the 4x 400 word blogs are well written and informative and uses no spinning or articlebuilder type stuff - I'm a decent writer and know about print, so I find this pretty easy. Each blog has 2 keyword links that point to specific pages on our site, along with one branding link that points to our homepage. It works out roughly that each blog gets a new post every 2 and a half days. We are looking to move this to six written and 9 repost blogs each day. The reposts don't have any links to us at all - they are there to dilute the links.

We are also doing some remedial work on our site to sort out H1 tags and a few other bits and pieces that need fixing, but this has not held us back too much up to now. Still, it will get done. We use SeNuke on the 15 blog sites. The homepage of our website, and the internal pages, also get an SeNuke evey couple of weeks.

We can tell from the keywords that we're working on (ones that have never been optimised for before) that the strategy is working, but we wondered what the rest of the experts on here thought to what we have in place so far.

I welcome your comments!

Jim