international seo tips

© 2011 Promodo www.promodo.comr.dobronovsky@promodo.com

International SEO Tips

Roman Dobronovsky,

Head of the SEO Department

Promodo Company

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© 2011 Promodo

Introduction Correct geo-targeting: general notes

How to choose domain name for multilingual SEO purposes

Multilingual sections within one domain

Secondary ranking factors

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Geo-Targeting Levels

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1. Country2. City or region (state, county, etc.)

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Googleworld

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Each country has its own Google

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The same language – different sites

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Local domain name is half of battle

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Case study: InetGiant.com and co.uk

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Case study: InetGiant.com and co.uk

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Domain for USA-oriented sites The majority of site owners ignore .us domain names

The majority of American sites have .com domain names (e.g., google.com,

amazon.com, ebay.com, groupon.com, etc.)

You can use any generic top level domain names without localization

(e.g., .net, .org, etc. vs. fr., co.uk, etc.)

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Domain name for SEO in Europe

There are special generic .eu domains for pan-European sites but usually

search engines prefer rank higher country-code top level domain names

(e.g., .it, .fr, .co.uk, etc.)

Solution #1: purchase of country-code top level domain name for each

country(.fr, .co.uk, .de и т.д.)

Solution #2: use of subfolders or subdomains (fr.site.com or site.com/fr/)

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Possible solutions for geo-targeting within one domain

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Subdomains: pro and contra

Example: http://fr.site.com or http://de.site.com

Pros:

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to set your site as local

There are no problems with registration of new domains for each local market

Subdomains can be placed on different servers

Cons:

ccTLDs have more chances to get ranked higher

User potentially has some problems with usability (http://fr.site.com – is “fr”

language or country?)

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Subfolders: pro and contraExample: http://www.site.com/fr/ or http://www.site.com/de/

Pros:

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to set your site as local

There are no problems with registration of new domains for each local market

Cons:

ccTLDs have more chances to get ranked higher

User potentially has some problems with usability (http://fr.site.com – is “fr” language or

country?)

The inability to place different language versions on different servers

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URL parameters: pro and contra

Example: http://www.site.com?loc=de or http://www.site.com?country=usa

Pros: Any, this variant is the worst

Cons:

ccTLDs, subdomains and subfolders have more chances to get ranked higher

There is a problem of duplicate content

User potentially has some problems with usability (

http://www.site.com?loc=de – is “de” language or country?)

The inability to set manually a site as local in Google Webmaster Tools

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The same content on the different domains: possible solutions

Example: two pages contain the same content – http://www.site.ca/page/ and

http://www.site.fr/page/

Solution #1: 301 redirect

Solutions #2: “Canonical” meta-tag

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Secondary ranking factors

Using Google Webmaster Tools. Con – this does not work for

ccTLDs (.ru, .co.uk, etc.)

IP

The language of the site’s pages

Contacts

Local backlinks

Using Google Places

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