Alright GAB I think I got you here.  
The answer you are looking for has to do with your XML Sitemap and using a nifty little tag called (Here comes a mouthful) "rel=alternate hreflang".

Here is a little MOZ article that talks about how to utilize these things. I think once you get these setup correctly on your site, Google.ca in English should show English and Google.ca in French should show French.

If you want a bit more information on this here is a Google Webmasters Support Article.

And because I am a nice guy and honestly just wish somebody would have shown me what a Wild XML Sitemap looks like that utilizes this I give you this: view-source:http://www.adobe.com/dma-amo-hreflang-sitemap.xml

It is actually pretty surprising the number of sites that still do not use this.

Hope this helps!

Yandex holds onto about 60+% market share in Russia for Search Engines and a few years ago (2013) was only one of four countries to where Google was not number one for market share. (http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2013-search-engine-market-share-by-country/)

As was said above, they also provide some tools similar to Google like Email, Docs, etc... and also provide a webmaster tools section for site owners similar to Google as well.  (I don't believe there to be a cost associated with the Webmaster Tools.) It also has been quite successful on unlocked Android phones in comparison to other SE's in other regions around the world.

One of the caveats that help really project Yandex to the top of Russia's SE use is the ability to parse through the Russian language differently and some would argue, better than Google.  It also claims to not utilize links in their algorithm due to the high volume of linkspam in Russia.  More about the nuanced differences has been published online but a high level article can be found here: http://www.semrush.com/blog/publications/5-advantages-yandex-google-russia/

If you are not trying to work within Russia deal with Russian then Yandex should not be of too much of a concern. The nuanced differences never hurt to learn though and these region specific SE's such as NAVER and Baidu are going to become more important in the future, or that is my guess at least, as the populations expand.  But hey, I am not Nostradamus either.

Yes, you are doing the right thing.  You may also want to look at including Meta Tags in the as well. ()

So here is a question that may be obvious but wondering if there is some nuance here that I may be missing.

Question:  Consider an ecommerce site that has multiple sites around the world but are all variations of the same thing just in different languages.  Now lets say some of these exist on just a normal .com page while others exist on different ccTLD's.  When you build out the XML Sitemap for these sites, especially the ones on the other ccTLD's, we want to ensure that using

<loc>http://www.example.co.uk/en_GB/"</loc>

<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en-AU"
href="http://www.example.com.AU/en_AU/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en-NZ"
href="http://www.example.co.NZ/en_NZ/"
/>

Would be the correct way of doing this.  I know I have to change this for each different ccTLD but it just looks weird when you start putting about 10-15 different language locale variations as alternate links.  I guess I am just looking for a bit of re-affirmation I am doing this right.</xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br>

Thanks!

If you don't mind what is the site...also if you don't normally use www before your url then try the command without that in the URL.

H1 tags do carry some weight in SEO and if that is something you want to rank for then I definitely see doing this.  You have the keyword used in the Title Tag with a concise description of the page and then utilizing the H1 tag as the product name reinforces the fact that this page is going to be highly relevant for that term.  Now the H1 tag is not as important as the title tag but is an indicator to the SE's that crawl the page and show relevancy.  What else would you consider making the H1 if you don't mind me asking.

Well I am not sure exactly what you need but if you want to use Google to get an idea of who is linking to you than use the following:

link:www.yoursitehere.com