International SEO Tips – For US Companies

Posted on | October 18, 2009 | No Comments

A key part of SEO strategy is internationalization. Internationalization involves structuring and formatting web sites so that they consistently receive higher search rankings inside the geographical region being targeted. There are several SEO practices that will result in higher web site rankings when targeting specific regions or groups of people.

Probably the most obvious practice is to use customized keywords, content, and language in order to increase the ranking of sites by localized search engines. This might mean having multiple sites written in the languages indigenous to the targeted geographical regions. When running an Internet search a user will almost always use keywords from their native language. If those keywords aren’t in your website then it will most likely not rank at all in the results returned from their search.

If you have multiple sites that have essentially the same content, but are written in different languages, then they can be linked to each other without being penalized by search engines. If two sites are for different regions but are written in the same language then try to restructure the content of the sites. One way to do this is to use local phrases, keywords, and spelling conventions to make the site more readable for the user and change the content in the process. Don’t overuse linking between sites, though, or search engines will interpret this as a linking network, which will degrade search rankings.

Another strategy is to register the site with a TLD (Top Level Domain) that is descriptive of the region that the site is targeting. One example would be that if a company that has an office in both the U.S. and Canada is trying to increase the visibility of the Canadian site they could register it with a TLD of .ca, for example marketingsite.ca. The .com domain name is by far the most common, but often gives the impression that the site is a U.S. business site for commercial use and is not for a specific region. Often search engines will rank a site higher that has a non .com domain if there are multiple sites having similar content. Make sure that there aren’t any restrictions to registering domain names that are associated with a specific country, though. Sometimes countries require that the company have a business office in that country before allowing you to register a site with a country specific domain.

Where the site is hosted could also play a part in search rankings. Some search engines will rank links higher if the site is hosted closer to the region where the search is initiated. They can tell where the site is hosted by analyzing its IP address. It might make sense to acquire a host in the region if you know that local search engines take this factor into account. Also, make sure that search engines are allowed in countries before employing a strategy to maximize the effectiveness of that engine. For example, most public networking sites, especially the ones belonging to Microsoft (Bing), were banned in China leading up to the anniversary of Tiananmen Square.

The main thing to remember when marketing sites internationally is to provide specific content that pertains to the geographical regions that are being targeted. This might be achieved through the use of language, keywords, technology such as domain names and collocation hosting, and possibly multiple sites if they need to appeal to a large diversity of users. Another useful technique is to research the area to find out what search engines are used most and develop strategies that will maximize the search rankings of your site for that audience.

Category: Strategy Lab

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