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You do have some content and it uses your keywords.  That's good.  Perhaps a little more content might be helpful, but I've gotten pages to rank well with very little text content.  Remember, that SEO is a balance of a lot of different signals.  If you are a little light on some (like being light on text in your case), then you can make up for that with some of the others (like getting more links and social shares). Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

If you have got a large website with 100's or 1000's of pages then you can prioritise which pages Google should see first in your XML sitemap. Your HTML should sit in the footer of your website and is important to have because it should increase the speed at which Google sees all your pages on the website. I always recommend having both XML and HTML

Normally redirects are 301 meaning supposedly they are permanent, now you can use a 302 redirect telling the search engine that the redirect is not permanent and it shouldn't update its registry with the contents of site B however if you want to keep the rankings on site A whilst ranking site B you can't really look at a redirect as a shortcut. If you look at it in the eyes of Google you redirect a site only to undo the redirect a little later down the line it would look sneaky. What you could do however is get some links on site A to site B and some of the link juice would be transferred to site B this way (though not as much as a redirect) and work on a SEO strategy this way. On the subject of domain name aside from ease of user remembering the name the URL doesn't really have an impact on SERPS. Unfortunately there isn't really a shortcut to ranking both sites as a redirect. Hope some info above was helpful.

Can you explain what you mean by optimizing a 404 page?

I'm honestly not completely clear on what the different URLs are for - I'd just add a note to keep the core difference between canonical and 301s in mind. A canonical tag only impacts Google, and eventually, search results. A 301 impacts all visitors (and moves them to the other page). A lot of people get hung up on the SEO side, but the two methods are very different for end-users. As Tom said, if these variations have no user value, you could consolidate them altogether with 301s. I always hesitate to suggest it without in-depth knowledge of the site, though, because I've seen people run off and do something dangerous.

Thank you very much guys for your answers, tips and insights! I will move accordingly...

I would do some research using OpenSiteExplorer to see if there are any nasty links to the page, but it sounds like you should be fine.

Thanks Tom Ash

Update - If anyone is curious. IT IS possible to get pages indexed by only linking through a sitemap. Roughly 90% of the pages I did not link to got indexed and are actually already receiving organic traffic.

I run a classified site and have different opinion: Submit your individual classified listing pages to site map. Title and descriptions of each classifieds are different and can help you bring long-tail traffic. Submit your individual classified listing images in site map, it will help you bring traffic through image search. Google and everyone else strong recommends to use rel=next and rel=prev rather then putting canonical to the first page. Also don't use both of them together because you will be confusing google. If you have to put canonical then do a canonical to the page minus anyother sort parameters so canonical on page 2 will be pointing to page minus all sort parameters, etc. Hope it helps !

Investigate your traffic sources. Is there any particular source that is sending traffic from the US as compared to the others. Are any of your marketing efforts causing more traffic coming in the from the US. Are there any cities in particular that are generating majority of the US traffic?

Hi! Did these answers take care of your question, or do you still have some questions?

Excellent answer Tom... thanks!

Thank you Peter, yes, we are aware of that and are working in some way to consolidate multiple versions of the same piece of music via canonical tags. I also think that's the only way to go for us. Thank you again for your insights!

I used pages for my category specific cornerstone articles that tend to get updated and then use posts to point to those cornerstone articles.  Works for me ...

Yes - assuming this is the final/good page, you have it canonical link to itself. See #5 on this post by DP http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Hi Yiannis Completely agree, but need to keep using Joomla for this one unfortunately. I have hidden the icons within the admin panel so I will see if this works during next Moz crawl Thanks!

This post from Stephanie Chang on How Should You Handle Expired Content may be helpful.

if you can get Yoast I would recommend him. Web dev Studios is fantastic you might want to consider a high-end search engine optimization firm as a company to work with along with a developer. For instance distilled.net seer interactive portent Internet marketing ninjas evolvingseo some other developers in WordPress Gregreindel.com you may want to speak to local search experts you can find many of them at getlisted.org http://www.myseolabs.org/ is a good place to start. All the best, Thomas