SMX - International SEO

Session Info

Moderator: Vanessa Fox (Features Editor, Search Engine Land)

Speaker:

• Andy Atkins-Kruger
  Managing Director, WebCertain Europe Ltd
• Duncan Morris
  Directore, Distilled Ltd
• Heini van Bergen
  Operations Manager, Tribal Internet Marketing

Inhalt: In dieser Session geht es darum, wie man seine Seite und SEO-Tätigkeiten anpassen muss, wenn man international präsent in den Suchmaschinen sein möchte (oder muss).

Session Inhalt

• 16.19: Duncan: when should you worry about internationalisation, the factors used by the search engines, pros and cons of various site architectures for geo-location, the answer

• 16.20: why should you care
  • increase in traffic
  • target new markets
  • decrease in bounce rate
  • improved conversion rate
  • more business
  • more money
  • need I go on?

• 16.21: not ranking
  • generic tlds (.com, .org, .net) can cause issue for local search engines
  • if you only rank in your local index but want to be listed everywhere

• 16.21: geo location
  • redirecting based on their ip address can be a good idea.
  • search engines tend to browse with an american ip address
  • information architecture is king
  • you must have a way for the search engines to browse to every page, in every language.

• 16.22: language: “to reach 90% of the worlds 1.2 billion internet users, companies must support 20 or more languages”

• 16.23: factors to flick the swtich
  • ccTLD
  • hosting location
  • google local
  • physical address on page
  • inbound link profile
  • webmaster central

• 16.24: for some reason I’ve yet to fully understand, Yahoo! and msn don’t listen to Google Webmaster central setting.

• 16.24: if you geo-target your site to be french you will most likely miss out on french canadian traffic.

• 16.26: one powerful domain
  • www.ikea.com
    > ikea.com/fr
    > ikea.com/en
  • a better solution would be
    > www.ikea.com/us/en
    > www.ikea.com/uk/en
    > /ca/fr, /ca/en

    this would allow you (force you) to write content targeting the relevant country, not just the relevant language.

• 16.27: pros and cons of ONE powerful domain
  • PROs
    + all your links go to one domain
  • CONs
    - lower CTR / conversion rate vs ccTLD
    - what should you put on the homepage?
    - american pages often outrank british pages

• 16.28: wikipedia.com (who only care about targeting languages)
  • en.wiki
  • fr.wiki
  • de.wiki
  • if you care about targeting individuals countries, the following is better.
    uk.example.com/en or ca.example.com/fr

• 16.30: sub domains the worst of both worlds
  • + all links to one domain
  • + could host subdomains in their local country

• 16.31: local ccTLDs (amazon.com & amazon.co.uk)
  • PROs
    + geo-targeting is much easier
    + improved ctr
  • CONs
    - link building is much harder
    - can lead to duplicate content issues
    - .com often still outranks other english tlds

• 16.33: whats the answer?
  • it depends on what you want to do with the domain
  • make sure you own all the relevant domains, and either use them or 301 them to the relevant place.
  • local busines units
    use the ccTLDs and treat as separate websites
  • business managed centrally?
    put everything on the .com and treat as one website

• 16.34: if the search engines are listening….
  • how about a way of claiming multpile domains?
  • what about using sitemaps to pass the language & location of a page
  • tell us if you ignore duplicat content if the pages are geo-targeted differently (rumours this is the case)
  • make more use of on page factors within a domain

• 16.35: Andy: 10 low hanging apples of international SEO

• 16.37: 10: Use UTF-8 character encoding.
  • backwardly compatible with ASCII
  • encodes up to four-byte characters
  • copes with any language from chines to arabic with diacritics - over 100,000 individual characters

• 16.39: 9: Don’t “translate” metatags. do NOT translate or localize your keywords

• 16.41: 8: adopt a global PR strategy

• 16.42: 7: manage 301s
  typical global site has: 00s of links going to “page not found” domains around the globe incorrectly set, several meta-refreshes and is still looking for links!

• 16.43: 6: keyword URLs

• 16.43: 5: source local links

• 16.44: 4: use a smart geo-selector

• 16.45: 3: expert keyword research, let it translate by natives. there are sometime no direct translations for a given word.

• 16.47: 2: ccTLDs or local hosting, absolute convinced that ccTLDs is the way to go, people expect to link to a local domain (even if the site does not exist!)

• 16.48: 1: language & content presentation. present the language well on the site.

• 16.55: Heini: Google is King. But not everywhere in the world.

• 16.56: in Russia is mail.ru the most used search engine. china is mainly using Baidu

• 17.00: in china baidu dominates the market by 29%

• 17.01: baidu serves up to 7.5 billion searches a month

• 17.01: baidus web index contain sover 740 million web pages. “Fact”: baidu gets paid to remove negative listings on formula

• 17.02: baidu is moving towards b2b, competing alibaba

• 17.03: baidu has on the paid placement a fixed pricing model, they also “mix” the traditional organic search with paid inclusions
  • russia Yandex dominates the market there by 48% to 31% on google., third Rambler Media with 10%
  • yandex largest russian search engine and web portal
  • yandex serves around 1.5 billion searches a month
  • yandex schedules IPO for 2009

• 17.04: around 80 billion searches monthly, 6 out of 10 searches conducted on google sites, so 32 billion are on non-google websites.