SEO forInternationalprojects

SEO forInternationalprojects

John HossackCEOjhossack@vkistudios.comTwitter @vkistudios

Ani LopezSEO Manageranilopez@vkistudios.comTwitter @anilopez

seo for international projects

twitter hash tag

#vkiseo

seo for international projects

INDEX

1. Cultural aspects2. Technical SEO3. Content localization4. Link building5. Web analytics

seo for international projects

Culturalaspects Culturalaspects

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seo for international projects

431

276

12594

68 61 60 58 45 35 35

050

100150200250300350400450500

En

glis

h

Ch

ine

se

Sp

an

ish

Jap

an

ese

Fre

nch

Ger

ma

n

Ara

bic

Po

rtug

ue

se

Ru

ssia

n

Ko

rea

n

Ita

lian

CULTURAL ASPECTSlanguage

Internet Top LanguagesEnglish: 431 million usersnon-English: 857 million users

1

1 CULTURAL ASPECTSdifferent habits

How regional context influence your strategy?

In Mediterranean counties Internet use is driven more by social factors than anything else,where Nordic countries rely on the internet for more pragmatic, functional purposes.

1 CULTURAL ASPECTSdifferent habits

How local habits may influence your strategy.

Online shoppers prefer to fill their online carts: Spanish between 12 and 1pm Germans and Italians between 2 and 4pm Danish shop from 5 to 6pm French shopping activities from 6 to 10pm British shopping hours around 8pm Swedes follow around 9pm

Tecnnical SEOTechnical SEO

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seo for international projects

TECHNICAL SEOdomains, directories and subdomains

Continental / regional Top Level Domains

.eu .asia Useless from SEO perspective

Not related to specific countries Europe / Asia are not uniform cultural entities

2

TECHNICAL SEOdomains, directories and subdomains Common situations: one country, several languages one language, several countries

How can we do it? main domain and subdirectories per language? main domain and directories per language? domains by country?

2

TECHNICAL SEOdomains, directories and subdomains Best option domains by country mycompany.com US mycompany.fr France mycompany.de Germany

but usually the most expensive: technical resurces required complicated to manage and coordinate one CMS for all or one per domain?

2

TECHNICAL SEOdomains, directories and subdomains Second option directories by country/language mycompany.com US mycompany.com/fr/ France mycompany.com/de/ Germany

One language, several countries mycompany.com/es/ Spain mycompany.com/es-ar/ Argentina mycompany.com/es-mx/ Mexico

2

TECHNICAL SEOdomains, directories and subdomains Directories by country/language

One country, several languages mycompany.com/es/ Spain generic mycompany.com/es-eu/ Spain / Basc mycompany.com/es-gl/ Spain / Galician mycompany.com/es-ca/ Spain / Catalan

2

TECHNICAL SEOdomains, directories and subdomains Directories by country/language cheaper: less technical resources required simple to manage and coordinate directories contribute to increase the general relevancy of domain and inherit its relevancy

Follow ISO 639-1 two letter codesOK /es/ KO /spa/ /spain/

2

TECHNICAL SEOmultilingual, directories and subdomains Worst option subdomains by country Search Engines consider subdomains almost a completely different entity than their domain (take a considerable amount of time to gain traction within the SERP’s)

they don’t inherit most of the domain's relevancy

contribute poorly to increase the domain's relevancy

2

TECHNICAL SEOmulticountry multilingual handling Are IPs by country important?Not actually (and it is expensive)

Country TLD's automatically associated to country

Webmastertools help directories-by-country sites to be associate with countries

2

TECHNICAL SEOmulticountry multilingual handling

2

TECHNICAL SEOmulticountry multilingual handling IPs are not important if options at Webmastertools are properly set

Rank #1 in Google.pt 'Pages from Portugal' checked, server located in Canada

2

TECHNICAL SEOmulticountry multilingual handling

Add xml sitemaps by subdirectory/country

2

TECHNICAL SEOmultilingual handling

Do not mix languages in same page / directory

2

TECHNICAL SEOmultilingual handling

Search Engines are great at detecting languages

Metatags for language definition are useless<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

If used, do it right<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

Indicate the right charset right after <head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

2

TECHNICAL SEOmulticountry multilingual handling

Entrance page for selecting language or country is a bad idea, don't make me click/think.

Language (browser) / Country (IP) auto detection+ redirect to right content is the best option using cookies to store user preferences

Do it server side, no JS, with proper redirectionsDouble check indexability in all web site or sites

2

ContentlocalizationContentlocalization

seo for international projects

CONTENT LOCALIZATION

Google translate is great tool but it is theworst idea to translate keywords / content

3

FAIL!

3

3

3 CONTENT LOCALIZATION

Same language, different words by country

Spanish

English wholesale Castillian venta al por mayor Argentinian venta mayorista Mexican mayoreo

3 CONTENT LOCALIZATION

3 CONTENT LOCALIZATION

Portuguese

English train Brazilian trem Portuguese comboio

Sometimes it is just a character

Brazilian correção Portuguese correcção

3 CONTENT LOCALIZATION

3 CONTENT LOCALIZATION

3 CONTENT LOCALIZATION

No other Search Engine makes a betterjob on multilingual support than Google.Most acurated data and they are free tools.

Google Translate Google Translated Search Local Google, country specific Google Insights for Search

Local search engines can help too:Yandex.ru, Yahoo.jp, Baidu.cn

3 CONTENT LOCALIZATION

DomainsCompany bought these domains:

sportsfootball.us sportsfootball.de sportsfootball.es sportsfootball.it

FAIL! Why?

3 CONTENT LOCALIZATION

sportssoccer.us sportsfussball.de sportsfutbol.es sportscalcio.it

Average web search according to Google Insights

DE football 8 fussball 27ES football 5 futbol 61IT football 5 calcio 68

OK!

3 CONTENT LOCALIZATION bad solutions

3 CONTENT LOCALIZATION bad solutions

Link buildingLink building

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seo for international projects

4 LINK BUILDING

Coherence in your link building strategy

Links pointing from each country toits related directory or domain

company.com/es/ ← Links from Spain company.com/es-ar/ ← Links from Argentina company.com/es-cl/ ← Links from Chile

make use of localized anchor texts in links

4 LINK BUILDING

comp.com/es/comp.com/es/comp.com/es-comp.com/es-arar//

““ventaventamayorista”mayorista”

““venta alventa alpor mayor”por mayor”

Web analyticsWeb analytics

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seo for international projects

5 WEB ANALYTICS

Global data is nice but useless.Non-segmented data leads you to wrong decisions.

Segmentation

5 WEB ANALYTICS

Advanced Segments combining Language and Region/Country shows how effective your SEO is

5 WEB ANALYTICS

Company having sites for Spain andLatin American countries. Domain by country.

Spain's site:How much traffic coming from Latin America?Traffic coming from else where?

5 WEB ANALYTICS

Create filter to segment keywordsby country specific Search Engines

Thanks!Questions?John Hossack Ani Lopezjhossack@vkistudios.com anilopez@vkistudios.com

Blog Twitterhttp://blog.vkistudios.com @vkistudios