I was published in this month's Franchising World publication. Read the Build Your Search Engine Rankings article.
Franchising presents some unique SEO opportunities. In addition to the standard onsite and link building tactics, I recommend that smart franchise operators leverage their franchise community to generate content and links to the franchise website. This is especially true for any franchise group that is using their website for end user sales generation.
As I point out in the article, getting everyone to understand and implement smart SEO is difficult but if you can get people to start thinking about it you'll build a more authoritative and high ranking site.