Does your location matter to your business? The answer is yes. Whether you are looking to promote a local service, your business offers a service targeted to only Canadians, or you want to establish your company as a global brand, your location matters. For effective SEO, you need to harness the importance of your location to your target audience.

Here are 4 effective strategies:

1. Local Search
Major search engines such as Yahoo! and Google allow you to register your business as a local business. The benefit to doing this is that your site will show up in the local search results that are highlighted at the top of general search engine results. Registering your business is free. Check out Google’s local business center to sign up.

2. Local domains
Website domains have certain conventions: for example, .com for businesses, .org for organizations, .edu for educational institutions, .gov for government sites. However, countries also have conventions to help search engines identify their location: for example, .ca for Canada, .us for USA, .uk for the United Kingdom. An important caveat is to set up one domain as your primary domain, for example, .com. then for a business that serves Canadians, also set up the .ca domain, but have it permanently redirected to the .com. A side benefit is the brand protection that owning multiple domains will provide you.

3. In Bound Links
Search engines place great value on in bound and out bound links from websites within a similar industry or with related content. When establishing a location, this network of related websites helps too. A network of links from our website to Vancouver based websites, and vice versa, helps to establish our website as a Vancouver-based business.

4. Content
It may sound like an overly simple recommendation, but content is often overlooked when establishing a geographic location online. To make sure that your site is recognized for your location, ensure that your location is mentioned on all pages of your website, not just the contact us page. An easy way to do this is to feature the address in the footer text that appears at the bottom of the page. Placing the address in the footer helps search engines to find the address easily, and it also helps your website visitors quickly identify if they have found a business in their desired area. Be sure to include the identifiers that best suit your goals, whether your city, province or state, country, or even multiple metropolitan centers for a global presence.

To some smaller organizations, the decision to add a blog to their website isn’t a hard one. What about those larger, more conservative companies? They stand to lose a lot more and aren’t generally a fan of the risk factor. Their fear is well justified though – employees have been dooced for posting confidential information or information that would be embarrassing to the organizations they worked for (like Heather Armstrong). Many companies are mainly worried about losing control of their company message and reputation.

However, there are many advantages to blogging for your business. They’re great for bringing traffic and links to the company website as well as promoting new products or services. Search engines love web pages that are constantly updated and include a lot of content - a blog caters to these search engine obsessions. A blog is also an easy way to measure success and receive feedback on a business’ products and services as visitors can easily comment (unless this is opted out of) on posts and link back to information they find valuable or interesting.

Before starting a company blog there are several things to consider. For example who will write for the blog? Should there be rules for writers? Which blog software should be used? A full-time blog takes a lot of work to maintain and writing interesting or valuable posts at a consistent rate can be difficult for any one regular employee to maintain. However if several employees are to contribute to the blog then it would be wise to establish some guidelines and policies for them to follow while writing. Staff availability and dedication is something that is essential to a successful corporate blog. Depending on the size of the company and how active the blog will be there are several different choices for blog software platforms. Some popular choices tend to be Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad.

Even though there are several risks to starting a blog for large companies there are also a few ways to mitigate that risk by adding things such as comment and post moderation – so that nothing goes live until it has been approved. Another way is to determine a low-risk focus to the blog while keeping it interesting and valuable to the readers. This keeps employee bloggers focused on safe topics that are unlikely to cause any large ruckus in the blogosphere.

Blogging for a business tends be very beneficial to companies if it’s done properly and with care - rushing into a decision such as this is likely not a good idea. If you plan on starting a blog for your business I highly recommend reading Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business by DL Byron and Steve Broback, as it will give you a great base for business blogging the smart way.

Copywriting for the web is an exercise in balance. Too wordy, and you’ll lose the attention of your audience. Too short, and you aren’t providing enough substance to sustain repeat visits.

The conundrum gets more complex when SEO is also a goal for your website. The reason is that text-based content is the food of search engines. As a result, content that is keyword rich is sure to get you some headway when it comes to search engine optimization. However, it isn’t as simple as loading a page with keywords.

The key to copywriting for SEO is balance. There are 4 factors to consider:

Keyword Density
Keyword density refers to the quantity of keywords seeded in your content, compared to non keyword phrases. Too many keywords in your content and you will do more harm than good. We recommend no more that 5% keywords.

Readibility
SEO will only get visitors to your website, it won’t make them stay. Misplaced keywords and unnecessary content will only frustrate your readers once they get there. Good well-written content will help encourage your website visitors to stay, explore, and even return again later, rather than bounce right off to the next site.

Value
Google values content, but it also highly values in bound links to your site. Link-based popularity means that other people like your site enough to link from their site to yours. To gain this popularity, you need to create value for your website visitors, not just for search engines.

Popularity
In-bound links not only help SEO, they also help drive website visitors to your site from referring websites. This is a great endorsement, and one that harnesses the true power of the web – your website visitors spreading the message about your website simply because they like it.