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I have a client where we put the specific local listing page url (example.com/locations/phoenix/location1) in the Google Places URL field. It works out really well as we get the home page ranking organically (depending on the query) and the specific places result locally. Sometimes they are combined and other times they are not, but we are in the mix somewhere almost always.
That is possible but the links could be helping them. I would wait to disavow until its actually a problem. you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot.
I have had something similar done to my site. One of my competitors "targeted" our business for negative SEO. I noticed a bunch of spammy links pointing to our site with outright X-rated / vile anchor text. The good news is that we haven't seen a drop in traffic or rankings and it's been going on for a while now. Google is pretty good a catching things like this. If you are doing "white hat" SEO and marketing, you probably don't need to worry about it.
In my experience, I had a client with the positioning like yours. We created the Places account and it just went into the local / maps results. The good news was that the SERP didn't contain any other organic listings at the top. If you have prominent and consistent rankings and are confident in your strategy, then you might not need to create a places account. Just be aware that moving down 1 spot could really be 8 or 9 spots on the real estate of the SERP. Moving down to #2 organically could mean being below the entire local results. You will need to judge the risk / rewards. Hope that helps.
Google has always changed title in the SERPs to what they think is best. In some cases, it can be a total nightmare. Search Engine Land posted this article yesterday on this exact same issue with two different companies: http://searchengineland.com/google-title-wrong-157819
Hopefully, Google will allow webmaster more control over their listings in the SERPs!
There are a couple of options for site owners in your situation. The first option is to create a 301 redirect from the "duplicate" page to the "preferred" page. This will eliminate that extra URL and forward it to the preferred one. If that's not possible for whatever reason, you can specify the rel canonical tag in your head section which basically tells search bots to prefer the page you specify in that tag. Here is info on rel canonical: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
You can post a job on Inbound.org for $50 for 30 days. Typically, higher caliber and quality experts will view the jobs on this site. http://www.inbound.org/jobs
You can also try Odesk or Elance but the results there can definitely vary.
Having a blog is definitely a smart idea. Even though you are using Open Cart, you can just create a subfolder on your host called 'blog' and run WordPress out of there. This way, your main Ecommerce site will be on example.com and your blog will be on example.com/blog. Google won't care that you're running two different CMSs. You are creating the content on your domain and as long as both CMSs are linking to each other then both your blog and Ecom site will gain benefit to any links.
Since Open Cart and WP are both open source, with the right development (or developer) you can actually tweak both systems enough to share the same template files, this way they look the same from a design standpoint. That's really another question in itself, but to summarize, yes, you should start your blog and definitely use wordpress for it if you are comfortable with it.
Personally, the only reason a pingback is useful for me is for the notification that someone is linking to me. When you "accept" the pingpack it displays it on the blog as if it were a comment. When you view the pingback in the comments on the post page it really doesn't make any sense at all and doesn't really have any value to the page or those looking at it. I typically just delete the pingback and go forward now knowing another site linked to me.
Also, there is the possibility that Google may crawl the link in your comments. In that case it will now look like a 2 way / reciprocal link, where there have been several cases that Google has discounted / devalued those types of links. Hope that helps.
Since people will not be able to visit the locations of your driver's addresses, I agree with you that you would not want to use that. Also, it will be a bad idea to setup home based service area businesses at your drivers' houses since they will essentially be able to control the listings you create. You will need to come up with some sort of space that is controlled and utilized by your business in those locations. It doesn't have to be a large space but it will have to be a unique address. Even though customers may never come to it, you'll still need to get it setup. Then, in Google places set the business up as a service area business with the appropriate areas that your drivers in that area can legitimately serve. Click the "hide address" box and you'll be good to go. You'll want to setup local phone numbers for each location as well.
Then you can create unique content around those other areas where you can do business directly on your website. Have localized content (services, reviews, phone number, etc) specific to each location. Set the URL for the places pages to those specific area locations on your website.
Edit: spelling and grammar
Definitely use the Yoast SEO plugin for anything regarding WordPress, it handles titles, meta, canonical URL, sitemaps, internal links, and much more.
As for themes, you're better off going with one of the premium providers, studiopress / Genesis framework which you mentioned it good as well as any of the Woothemes. These work well with the Yoast plugin. Themeforest themes may look nice but the code and development will be poor and not up to standard which will cause plugin conflicts and other theme issues.
You will typically get these errors when Googlebot is unable to access your site. This usually happens when your website is down for whatever reason. You might want to check your server logs or talk to your web host and see when your website was unavailable. If it is down often you may want to consider moving web hosts.
Definitely add the Room H and update it with all of the citations you currently have. Also, "S." and "South" are different and will throw off the consistency, same with "St." and "stree" or "suite" vs "ste" vs "#". Make sure you enter the same information everywhere.
"In summary, is it correct to say that H1 and H2 tags are stronger signals to the search bots of what the page is about?"
Absolutely. These tags are strong signals to search engines as to what the page is about, along with title tags and meta descriptions. You can prioritize content and break down the page with H1 through H6 headline tags. SEOmoz has a great on-page best practice guide for setting up the page, which makes sense for your users as well as search engines. Try not to spam keywords anywhere, just make sure it is "keyword friednly" but at the same time readable and would make sense to a human.
Categories should depict what your business is (e.g. Hospital), not what it does (e.g. Vaccinations) or products it sells (e.g. Sony products or printer paper). This information can be added in your description.
Although it does not say "don't add a location" to your categories, there still isn't a good reason to. Google is well aware of your location, so the only reason any SEO would put the location in the category would be to manipulate Google. Once you do that, your listing is going to suffer. Based on experience, do not add location to our client's category listings. And to be blunt, if you're working with a Local SEO who insists on adding it your category, you may want to explore other options.
There are 5 different categories you can associate your business with. Definitely use as many as you can from Google's pre selected categories. It is okay to come up with your own categories. Google's policy on this is to not add location based information to your categories. A good rule of thumb is to think of what your business is, not what it sells and use that as a category. You can use the additional info and description to mention what you sell.
To make it short, it's okay to use custom categories, just don't spam them for city name + keywords.
If I were you, I would completely get rid of the richardson-tx out of your URLs. The only reason why you would do this is for Google. It makes no sense for the user to have this in the URL, so you should get rid of it.
I would keep your URLs short:
/services/cosmetic-dentistry
/services/cosmetic-dentistry/teeth-whitening
There are local signals that you can do on page besides your URL that will benefit Google and users. For example:
These will get you further down the local path than manipulating your URLs to contain many keywords, which doesn't make sense for the users.
You can and should include both if you are able to. You are not limited to using one element of schema.org on any page. It's helpful for Google and other search engines to better categorize and understand the elements of your page. If you have a video on a page with a description written by a particular author, then definitely include both. As to how that page will show up in SERPs is Google's call, which will depend on the query.
What's the URL to your site? I do not see one posted above.
In short, domain authority is calculated from the authority of the domains that link to you. If a 49 DA is inadequate for your ranking then you will need to chase links from domains who have much higher DA than who are linking to you now. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority