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First of all, you must ask your client if she target different regions like continents for some reason related to her business. If not, then going multilingual is the best solution that trying to geotarget countries... also because, as Gaston wrote already, you cannot geotarget anything but nations: no continents, no political or economic states unions (like the UE). If there's some justified business reason why the client needs to specify different versions for different large areas, then things can be weird, but there's a way to do it: using as many hreflang annotations as they are the countries present in a bigger geo area and targeted by a specific website. Remember, in fact, that an URL can be annotated with as many hreflang annotations as needed. i.e.: the www.domain.com targets Italy, UK and France with its English version but not other states for whatever reason (so not able to use simply hreflang="en") and Spain with the Spanish one, then its hreflang will be: <rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/" hreflang="es-ES"></rel="alternate"> <rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-GB"></rel="alternate"> <rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-IT"></rel="alternate"> <rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-FR"></rel="alternate"> (I know it would be better to create an Italian and French version too, but this was just an example to give you an idea of what I was saying).

Touche EGOL... Touche...

You can use the hashtags and query strings to display the content, just be sure to specify the URL parameters in Webmaster tools so you dont have multiple URLs getting indexed.

If your website is just syndicated content, it will hurt your seo.  But if you are doing your own activities and add in articles from other places around the web (which creates a beneficial user experience), it can help you get more readers and links. I would not expect that the aggregated content would rank well on your website as it is just a duplicate from another site that deserves rankings for related keyphrases.

I would agree with Dean just to explain that the reason www.domain.es/en is better than en.domain.es is because the /en keeps the authority in your site rather than separating to a sub domain which sort of helps you a bit.

How do you mean navigated by cookies?

Thanks for the response Alan, really helpful to get another persons opinion. We're thinking that all  content detail needs to presented on ONE url regardless of the section that you arrive to it from and any inline content reveals will need to be unique to that section – so the content should be more relevant

Not sure about MaxMind, but yes you do have to be carefull with GeoIP targeted content, A simalr question has come up about it before, hopfully that will help you. http://moz.com/community/q/showing-different-content-according-to-different-geo-locations-on-same-url

I placed rel=canonical on some content that is shared by two websites.  Now when I go into webmaster tools and look at backlinks.  The pages on the site that have rel=canonical are displayed as backlinks on the site with the original copy. I am really happy with how this is working.

Thanks for the responses! I think we're going to have to go down the route of styling the heading to look like an h1 and then use the heading which is related to the content to be the h1 to avoid duplication and the make best use of the header tag. Really good to get other opinions !

Thanks so much for the quick responses, really appreciate it!

You're welcome. Good luck with your project.