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You've got the right idea. Just be very certain that the url used in the canonical is the correct url for each page.

I think it depends on your site, the content, how intuitive it would be to split the article, etc.

I think SEOmoz had done an analysis awhile back that looked at which blog posts got the most links. Length of article was one of the factors they looked at, I think. Alas, I can't find that article now, though. Anyone else have the URL?

It would depend on what services and strategies were included. For example, how many blog posts per month? Do you just monitor the Facbook page or pro-actively promote it? Do you run contests or viral promotions?

Are you sure this site is the source Google Places is using to add the location? Another possibility is that this site and Google Places are both getting their data from the same source...

mydomainname.com/muscle-cars/ and mydomainname.com/muscle-cars/muscle-car-restoration.html are two completely separate urls. I wouldn't worry about that.

Manuel,

I can think of a couple good options:

Use meta tags to set page to noindex,follow so search engines won't index the page, but they'll pass the link juice on to other pages on your site.

Let the page get indexed, and use the canonical meta tag to ensure that only one version is indexed.

Better Design
I suggest upgrading the design of your blog so it's more custom. A sharp, custom design gives your blog a visual brand and helps you stand out. Also, make it more personal - use author bios, profile pictures, contact info, etc.

Better Content
For us little guys, having phenomenal content is of the utmost importance important. Since you don't have a large following, you need to publish content that is completely unique and/or significantly better than any other content available on the topic.

Example: I publish an article on 301 redirects. If my article article doesn't present important new information, and it's not better than the articles on 301s already on SEOmoz, SEJ, etc - very few people will bother to read, share, or link to my article. Why should they? There is an equally good or better article on a blog they already know and trust.

If you want to see significant success on social media, your content needs to be exceptional. Epic. Head and shoulders above the rest. Groundbreaking.

Marketing
To answer your question more directly, my suggestion for bloggers is to focus on social media and SEO.  Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Inbound.org can be great traffic sources for exceptional content.  If you want to do paid advertising, Outbrain can provide good traffic at 0.03 per click. Twitter ads can also be effective.

I think that the design and content of your blog need to be improved before your marketing efforts will fully pay off, though. It's not that your blog is bad (it's not) but it's not yet exceptionally good.

Hope that helps. (All criticism was offered with the friendliest, most constructive attitude possible!)

We've created a (free) tool to help content marketers brainstorm ideas and topics for content pieces. Just enter your keyword, and see related content pieces from social media.

You can try the tool at http://www.rypmarketing.com/tools/topics/

Any ideas or suggestions to make this tool better?

Well, Google typically shows a mixture of web and Places results for local queries.

To get ranked among the web results for the second city, just adding a page to your website could work. To get ranked among the Google Places listings, you are going to need an office in the second location and create a Google Places listing for it.

Yeh, that would do it if all the pages had tags saying the homepage was the canonical url!

Apparently I either didn't notice them, or you had already deleted them when I looked at your page.

Based on the below two facts, I would put the snippet length for your videos in your sitemap:

1. Google can crawl the videos and may know that the actual length doesn't match what you are saying it does.

2. Google has a published policy for newspapers that have paywalls and don't allow free full access at http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/update-to-first-click-free.html Basically, "We will crawl, index and treat as "free" any preview pages - generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story - that they make available to us. This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it's not cloaking."

Let's say I want to find blog posts posted in the past week or so about "key west". These posts could be on a personal blog, travel blog, etc.

Google News is mostly news sites (not blogs) and Google blog search doesn't work any more. What other good options are there?

So far Open site Explorer Just Discovered is the best option I've found, but there is a lot of other stuff mixed in with a few blog posts.

1. If you're looking for an SEO to start the process and show you what to do, you'll need more than 20 hours per month to implement a serious SEO strategy.
2. I have worked with a couple food/wine/luxury type sites, but I think industry experience is less important than other factors. SEO tactics are mostly the same across industries, and the goal is to showcase your industry expertise, not the SEO company's. I'm not saying industry experience isn't helpful, but it's definitely not the most important thing you should look for in a company. Probably the most important thing you should look for is a SEO company that does SEO by delivering value to users, and aims to pursue the spirit, not just the letter of Google's guidelines.
3. My company, and many other good SEO companies, are happy to provide hourly consulting services. You just pay for as much or as little as you want.

I know this answer doesn't directly answer your question, but I hope it is helpful in some way!

Could you give us your website URL?

When did you see the drop in traffic?

Depending on what the pages are, I would let them get indexed so they can be ranked for any longtail keywords, then perhaps 301 redirect them to the main sale page. Or leave them up with a notice that product is no longer available but display related products.

http://www.prnewswire.com/ is a good portal with a lot of bloggers and journalists that use it.

I think you will find that individual outreach is needed, unless you're already working with a well-known brand.

404 is the correct status to return for page not found. Matt Cutts has indicated that Google does a pretty good job of guessing when a 200 page is an error page, but why not make it easy for Google? I always prefer to use 404 or 301 for pages that don't exist.

Either should be fine from an SEO perspective. I'd decide based on what would make most sense to users - probably the second.

1. 9932 orphan files - does just removing them affect my SEO.. I like a clean house, can I somehow use them to my benefit?

If they are truly orphaned (not used by anyone or linked to from anywhere), you could probably just delete them.

2. Hundreds of 404s with many external "follow" links that we are no longer getting juice from

I would probably 301 redirect them to a very relevant page.

3. 8 Sitelinks in webmaster tools, but only 4 show in our search

That's not unusual. Google may show the others on some different searches.

Yes and Yes! You can certainly get two pages ranked for the same keyword.

Check out these resources:

http://andybeard.eu/1376/google-double-indented-listing.html

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/draft-whiteboard-friday-getting-indented-listings