You can post the link here for everyone to see. Or you can shoot me a PM and I'll take a quick look.

Nope, won't cause any problems. The xml sitemap is what you will submit to G and search engines while the HTML one is for your site visitors who want to see all your pages (although it will be crawled and indexed as well).

Excellent analysis! #6 and #7 are the big ones. Make sure your site is seen as relevant and get links from other relevant sites.

In GWT > Optimization > Content Keywords - this table will give you a gist of the kind of keywords on your site. If its not what you were expecting to see, you need to change your content.

If the current site is getting a lot of traffic and the new site would be a drastic change from the current site, I would look into hiring a coder to fix the hardcoded urls issue.

Everything you mentioned is plausible if not probable including negative SEO impact, loss of domain authority/ranking and issues with branding.

If the new site is going to be on different pages, make sure you 301 redirect the old pages to the new subdomain/domain. Aside from that, can't really do much =/

Good luck,
Oleg

Follow & Connect

I see you on page 4 on google.ca for the term - http://www.google.ca/#q=human+resource+books&start=30

Not in top 100 for .com

Sooooo. the .ca domain is definitely helping you rank in G.ca so you are appearing in their SERPs. For the .com results, you will see that the competition isn't very easy. Many books.google, amazon and publisher results means that you need to build plenty of high authority links before you can expect to see any rankings.

The .ca domain is also hurting your changes of ranking high on the .com (international) search results.