Continued from Monday…
- Make sure to use the correct meta tag for language in the header like this – <metaname=”language” content=”spanish”>
- Make sure to localize the content of each site. For example in the UK organization is spelled organisation. It is best to have a country native read the content and help to make edits based on how people really speak in that country – even English for the UK and Australia.
- This was an interesting tip I found: “Local hosting: If you have ccTLD or set the geo targeting in Google webmaster tools, local hosting does not have much of an incremental impact in most countries as a geo signal. However, it still helps hugely in some countries especially China.” http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2334892/international-seo-tips-what-are-the-game-changing-factors Google goes on to say: “We do, however, recommend making sure that your website is hosted in a way that will give your users fast access to it (which is often done by choosing hosting near your users).”
- “HrefLang” XML sitemap: Many websites have problem with a different country page ranking in a country. It may be caused by the fact that your International website is using ccTLD and cannot set the geo targeting or the local site not having enough links from local websites. “HrefLang” XML sitemap was created to help those website owners. Basically, it maps the URL of the page ranking with the URL of the page you want to rank instead. It even works across domains. Once you match the pages one to one for each of the country/language combinations, and indexed by Google, you will quickly see the right pages replace the old ones in each market.” For more great info on this topic visit this wonderful resource page http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2334892/international-seo-tips-what-are-the-game-changing-factors
- Metadata – language and country code: You should place “content-language” meta tag indicating the language and country in the <head> section of webpages. It tells engines the target audience by language and country of the created page. The code looks like this: <meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us”> You change “en-us” for other language and country such as “en-uk” for U.K. English and “de-at” for Austrian German. While Google doesn’t weigh this signal as heavily as geo targeting, it still helps with other search engines. You can read more on this topic here: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2334892/international-seo-tips-what-are-the-game-changing-factors
- Work on getting some local links for each new country specific website. If you don’t have any, Google will most likely not show the domain in the search engine results. Start first by linking the US parent website to all new global sites. Then see if you can get local business partners and chambers of commerce to link to the new local site regionally. Setting up LinkedIn and social profiles for the staff at the new location may be helpful as those links will point back to the newly created region specific website, but look for additional links as well.
- Blogging for these small regional websites may be very important for slow link building growth which would be good for Google.
- Make sure to set up Google and Bing Local pages for these new websites. Again the links from these social and map properties help Google to understand that these are like new branch offices for you.
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