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Angela,

The "spaniel boys" will possibly disagree as they usually place the encouragement of questing to be more important than heel work but, for my money, you should start encouraging proper walking to heel as soon as you start taking the puppy for walks on a lead. Simply bring forward the relevant part of the training.

Indeed you could split it - train the dog to walk to heel, without pulling, while on a lead now - but then wait a couple of months more, until other basic obedience is well instilled, before moving on to walking to heel without the lead.

Going back to the first part of your question - again you will get conflicting views - but when I call a dog to come to me I just expect him to come to me. I would then follow that up with one or more other commands. For example, if I wanted him to sit facing me, I would give a "sit" command when he reached me. If I wanted him to fall into heel while I walked forwards, I would give a "heel" command when he reached me. If I wanted him to sit at my side, facing the same way as me, I would give "heel" followed by "sit", probably with some hand indication to make the commands clear.

In fact I doubt if dogs differentiate between "here" and "heel". The two words are maybe not sufficiently phonetically distinct for that. I suspect that it is the word linked to what else you do at the time that determines how the dog interprets the command. As I write this, it occurs to me that while I do use "here" in early training, later on I hardly ever use the word but, rather, use the whistle far more to recall the dog.

There are other variations that you can introduce, depending upon your personal preferences. For example, you can train a dog, walking at heel, to sit without a command every time you stop walking. That's quite useful if you walk the dog on city streets and want it to stop and sit when you reach the kerb at a road junction or before crossing the street. Or you can train it to walk at either side of you, depending upon which hand's fingers you snap when you give a "heel" command.

There are no hard and fast rules (unless you intend trialling the dog, in which case you need to train it to do what field trial judges will expect.)