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Very helpful -- gives me some great perspective to start with.  Thanks to both EGOL and Yannick for your responses.

Our client was just acquired by a larger company and they want to merge their 100-page website into the larger, parent company's 500+ page website.  They currently have a strong ranking for a focused group of keywords and are worried about losing their ranking position for those important keywords.  The keywords are roughly 80-90% of the focus of the old site, but will represent only 30-40% of the focus of the new site.

Will this move hurt their rankings?  What can we advise them to do to retain the value of their current ranking strength for the target keywords?

Could you tell me whether the "canonical fix" is still a relevant and valuable SEO method?

I'm talking about the .htaccess (or ISAPI for Microsoft) level fix to make all of the non-www page URLs on a website redirect to the www. version - so that SEO "value" isn't split between the two.

I'm NOT talking about the newer <rel= canonical="" http:="" ...="">tag that goes in the HEAD section on an HTML page - as a fix for some duplicate content issues (I guess).  </rel=>

I still hear about the latter, but less about the former.  But the former is different than the latter right - it doesn't replace it?

And I'm not sure if the canonical fix is relevant to a WordPress-based website - are you?

Also I can never find any page or article on the Web, etc. that explains clearly how to implement the canonical fix for Apache and Microsoft servers. Could you please point me to one?

Thanks in advance!

Great Q&A here - very clear and helpful.  Now let me expand the question to H2 tags.  If I keep the H1 as a proper heading on a page, but embed an H2 tag in a sentence is that considered acceptable SEO tactics?

Here's the example - as the 3rd paragraph of a page:

If you’re interested in

commercial landscaping design

, we’re the ones to call.  Call us at 1-866-236-7263 or contact us by email.

What do you think?

We have a client that is a solar energy installation & leasing company in Austin, TX that wants to target the Houston and Dallas markets.  We can do a Place Page for their physical offices in Austin and San Antonio to drive traffic for those cities.  But we’re not sure the best way to help them rank for Houston and Dallas, where they don't have a physical address.  We’re considering a separate landing page for each city, optimized for the geo-term.  Will that help them to rank in the 7Pack in Houston and Dallas, if there’s no Place Page?   Will it help them rank in the organic listings for that region?  Can you offer any other suggestions for how to help them rank in 2 cities where they don’t have physical offices?

I tried Mike's suggestion (thank you Mike, and Jordan).  It didn't work -- first few times anyway.  Then I took the Suite # out of the address (to change the address, but with only a slight edit) and tried verification again.  Again, only the phone option was offered.  I tried Mike's suggestion again, failed the phone verification and this time -- Google DID come back with the postcard option.  Yahoo!

I'm not sure whether the multiple tries is what did the trick or if the address edit did it.  I hope the address edit hasn't made things worse.

Yikes!  Is there really no other option than to just wait for the return of postcard verification?  Isn't this a relatively common problem, that companies have automated phone systems?  How do others deal with it?

Most of the time, when we claim a Google Place Page, they give 2 choices to verify ownership:  1) phone verification and 2) postcard verification.  But right now (and for several weeks), for our listing, they are only giving the phone verification choice, which unfortunately won't work with our automated phone system.  How can we get our Place Page listing verified through a postcard sent to our address, when Google isn't presenting that as an option?

Thanks Miriam.  That explains why Google took one of the individual location listings and essentially called it the main medical center listing, linked to the home page, whereas they didn't do that with the other location listings.  Excellent.  Very helpful.

On the Yelp thing, I have seen multiple different listings with different addresses for different locations of a single entity (other medical centers).  So I think I'm going to try it.

I've had problems with a client that is a local medical center with multiple sites/addresses. We've created a Place Page for each location and linked it to the location page on the client's website that matches the address on the Place page.  But that means we're not linking to the medical center's home page -- and Google Places doesn't like that. I know this because after we'd owner-verified each Place Page, Google went in and just changed the website link that was a deep link to a location page and replaced it with a link to the home page. But now there's not an address match.

How should we handle this?

Related question:  Does it make sense to claim a separate listing in Yelp and other local directories for each of the separate locations since they each have a unique address?  Will Yelp & other local directories allow for links to non-home pages on the client's website?