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Hi there - we already have a Canadian website for the company and we're building one for our American branch.  From an SEO perspective what is the best approach here? We have already purchased a .com domain and the company is branded a little different in the US than in Canada.  How do I tell Google that this site is American and should be served primarily to the American audience? Should I be tagging duplicate content with rel=canonical (for similar pages like the About us section for instance) or does that matter here? Hope you guys can help.  Thanks!

A "head term" is essentially the opposite of a long-tail keyword.  For instance if you find a long-tail keyword that gets 100-500 searches per month and isn't too difficult to rank for ... say that keyword is "homes for sale in vancouver bc" ... the head term in this case is "homes for sale" which would be getting a lot more search volume but would also be extremely more difficult to rank for because everyone is trying to rank for it.  In this case, if you're a national brand, both keywords are useful to you so you can create a page optimized for "homes for sale" (the head term) and optimize it for both this term and the long-tail.

Flimsy example, I'm sorry, but my mind is blanking and this is the best I can give you! haha.  Also just noticed this post is over a month old but I'm gonna post this anyway in case it helps anyone.  Cheers.