Bill Hartzer posted an excellent article at WebProNews about SEO for corporate websites. He goes over the most important items, including: the home page, product pages, news, articles, leadership and ROI.

Although your corporate website does not allow customers to purchase products or services online, your company can benefit greatly from optimizing your website for the search engines. Ranking well in the search engine results will not only increase your business’s brand awareness, it will bring increased sales leads, which will lead to increased ROI from your corporate website.

First, he recommended that the corporate homepage have paragraphs of text and links to the most important pages in the site.

Second, the article mentions that on the product and services pages, each page should be unique. These pages should also include several paragraphs of text with targeted keywords in that text.

Product or services pages can help bring in sales leads for your company. When potential customers are looking for a product or service the company sells, they typically turn to search engines. When they find your product or services page listed in the search engines, the visitor will come directly to your product or service page. They’ll typically take a few seconds to glance at what you have to offer; its at that time when you need to give them some sort of action to take.

Mr. Hartzer also argues that the company news and events pages are an important way to increase brand awareness and generate leads. He makes a great recommendation about trade shows:

Oftentimes people search at the search engines for trade shows they’re going to attend. By including separate web pages about each trade show the company is going to attend or exhibit at, there’s a good chance that people searching for that trade show in the search engines will see the page on the corporate website mentioning the fact that the company is attending; this can lead to company and brand awareness as well as potential sales leads. If someone is searching for the trade show then they’re interested in that particular industry; so those types of visitors to your corporate site are extremely targeted and valuable.

Corporate websites offer an excellent way to market the company as an industry leader. Including articles from the company’s experts will increase the website’s credibility. Additionally having information about the company’s executives is helpful for those who search for this information. Each leadership page should have it unique title and description.

The article’s concluding paragraph is a must read for corporate or “in-house” SEO:

By making a few changes to your corporate website that dont sacrifice its quality and good looks, you can make your corporate website pay for itself by turning it into a serious lead generation tool. Not only will your corporate website be found at the top of the search results, it will be seen as an industry leader and start to show up everywhere for your company’s most important keyword phrases, the phrases related to your products and services. And not only will the corporate website be found more often in the search engines, it will increase your company’s brand awareness.