Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am very much a novice and have had some success with cms systems.  I have found they offer a variety of options and are very intuitive.  Some even talk about trade offs regarding different styles and formatting issues.  There are a lot of great cms platforms out there for you to use, I am sure you will find one which will work great for you.   Dave

Hi Dale, Really stupid question, how do I look at the CSS to identify that? I've viewed source but cant see that information anywhere on the page. If you wouldn't mind, could you point me in the right direction of some information about this issue, I would be interested in understanding it better, but until you brought it to my attention, I had no idea even to look for it J

I stand corrected on that point. Thank you Jassy for sharing the link. I was not aware Google made that change.

While this isn't a scientific answer, based strictly on my opinion, I would use a .ca for a local site, and a .com if organic is more important. I have never tried it, but when a person in Canada types in Google.com are they automatically redirected to Google.ca?

I agree with Dignan99's initial thoughts about the ability of SE's to connect the dots. I've also found the on-page targeting of the geographic terms to be crucial. I've found a lot of value in getting a link for, say, "IT Services" and pointing it deeper into the site to a page that targets "IT Services Boston". In terms of actual places to get links, I've always felt that getting links that are not only topically relevant, but also geographically relevant is important in that sort of campaign. I tend to go for good quality regional or local sites.

Removing of the footer is in the progress already

if you want to rank competitively in the US and AU then I strongly recommend local domains. In my experience, subfolders on a single domain are less effective then local domains. The above solution can work and you are at an advantage that your CA site is established and is the "parent" site. It is more work to maintain separate domains, but in my experience of managing .com sites, we have always faced a challenge because despite the target setting in WMT, Google still struggles to rank the UK site in the UK over the US site in many instances because it is on a .com and because there is a US version of the site.

Hey... Unless these articles are going to extremely reputable sources, I would not bother with any article submissions.  I would concentrate on adding content to the website and/blog, and consider doing guest blogging on other sites you may be networked with. Article submission for the sake of SEO is not the best idea following the drop in rank of many of the large article databases. Also, every article submitted to these places should be unique if you were still choose to use them. Often times the sites will check for dupe material.  While I have read that there will be no punishment for the dupe content by the search engines, it may not help your cause.  It would just be a waste of time an resources. If you were to publish an article that goes viral, or possibly a higher end press release, I could see how this might be more powerful and well worth it.

This might help: "If you have an ASP.NET web application site, and you place a text file named "app_offline.htm" in the root of the site, all requests to that website will redirect to that app_offline.htm file. Basically, if you need to take an entire ASP.NET site offline, you can place some nice message in that file. Then, any new requests to a URL, any URL, in that website will redirect to that file allowing you to do maintenance to the site, upgrades, or whatever. It is not really a redirect though. ASP.NET essentially shuts down the site, unloads it from the server, and stops processing any requests to that site. That is, until you delete the app_offline.htm file - then things will continue as normal and your ASP.NET site will load up and start serving requests again. A super-cool side effect of this is that any files that are locked by the site, such as a database or other resources, are freed since the application domain has been unloaded from the server. This allows you to remove the locks from those files and replace them, without the need to do a full IISRESET, taking down other sites on the server. One thing to keep in mind with this file however, make sure you out enough content in it so it is larger than 512 bytes or IE will consider it a 404 and will display the 404 instead of the contents of your app_offline.htm file." Source

Thanks Donnie, yeah I contacted Cindy... just didn't know if there was mobile SEO only, instead of Mobile UX. But it sounds like she deals with both.

It all really depends I guess.  Is Johnston a city or suburban community?  If I sent something to your address and put Des Moines on it, would it arrive? How many people search for hotels in Johnston versus Des Moines? Either one you choose, you'll have to get everything to match.

Thanks. Indeed, site is very well ranked, but we think it should be better placed, and one indicator which is not strong enough is links, so that's why we think we should work hard on it.