This is a Guest post by Christian Arno of Lingo24.com

It’s true that English is widely spoken these days, but when it comes to web and search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, businesses shouldn’t forget that over 50% of all Google searches are done in a language other than English. It’s easy to see why this is important for SEO strategy when trying to reach customers abroad.

When it comes to an SEO strategy for multilingual online marketing, you could focus on making a website for each different language you’re targeting, or making a website aimed at each country you’re targeting. The difference is an important one and you’ll soon see why.

SEO by Language

Creating a website for each language you’re targeting seems like the simplest way forward on the face of it, but it is likely to be less effective in the long-term.

It’s certainly faster to set-up and cheaper in the short-term, because you only need to create one website for each language to catch anyone who searches in that language, regardless of what country they’re in. So you could have an English site to catch UK, American and Australian searchers, a French one to catch French, Belgian and Swiss searchers and so on.

However, it’s not only a site’s content that search engines take notice of – they also take location into account when they’re ranking websites. Google will list sites which are closest to a searcher’s local area first in many cases, so if your site is hosted in the UK, it may be viewed by Google as less relevant to searchers in other countries, and therefore come much lower down in the search listings in Australia and America.

Another drawback to focusing on language alone is that the one-size-fits all approach doesn’t account for the way people actually use language. Just think of the differences between US and UK English, for example. The British say ‘mobile phone’ but Americans say ‘cell phone’, and you can see the implications this has for keyword selection in such a booming and competitive industry as mobile communications. Similarly, UK shoppers would search online for ‘tights’ but Americans would look for ‘pantyhose’. It’s not just the words, but the spellings too, such as color/colour, realize/realise and so on. These subtle but important differences exist in almost all cases of countries sharing a language.

SEO by Country

The other option is to optimise your websites on an individual country basis. Creating and optimizing a website for each country is obviously more time-consuming and expensive initially, but you will see better results.

An obvious example of one of the immediate benefits of this is currency. Many countries that share a common language don’t share a common currency – just look at the UK, America and Australia. If a potential customer sees prices listed in a currency that’s not their own, it can really put them off – just think about your own shopping experiences. It’s not just the currency, either. In some countries credit cards are the most common way of paying online, but in others, such as Italy, it’s third-party companies such as PayPal.

By creating a site for each country, you’ll also improve your content and branding. The differences may be very subtle, such as the photographs you choose, the news you display or the way you greet customers on your home page, but these can all have a massive impact on how customers view your company and your product.

Having a country-specific Top Level Domain (TLD) is very good for search engine rankings too. eBay is an example of a company that does this. You will notice that eBay has a different TLD for each country: such as America – eBay.com; the UK – ebay.co.uk; France – ebay.fr; and so on. These country-specific TLDs will automatically rank higher in search engines for local searches. Hosting the site in the target country will boost rankings further.

Crucially, having country-specific websites allows you to target keywords properly, taking into account important linguistic variations. You’ll also have much more of an opportunity to target long-tail keywords, such as ‘mobile phone repair Newcastle-upon-Tyne’, rather than relying on catch-all general terms.

As you can see, creating an optimised site for each country you’re targeting is the best way to compete for customers abroad and a far better approach than targeting your sites by language. However, cost and time are understandably key factors for businesses to bear in mind, and the approach is more expensive and time-consuming because each country site needs an SEO strategy and its own content specialists.

One way around this is to take a gradual approach. Add sub-domains for target countries to your site and see which ones perform well. Based on this information, you can then create full country-targeted sites, as your budget allows.

Even if your quest for world domination starts one country at a time, you’ll quickly see the benefits of localization when you see how well your country-targeted sites perform.

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of professional translation company Lingo24, experts in the foreign language internet. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over sixty million words for businesses in every industry sector. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.

In a previous article we looked at some of the complexities between language and geography for international Seo, and how they apply to top level domains. In this article are going to be looking at other indicators that you can use to tell search engines which country or language your content is in, to help it rank in the appropriate place.

As companies and organizations strive to build worldwide presences, and rank for multiple terms in multiple languages or geographic regions, they can often have great difficulty telling search engines which content applies to which language or region. However, there are certain tools that webmasters and marketers have at their disposal. As discussed previously, the use of country specific TLD’s, and language specific subdomains are key indicators that the search engines use in determining relevance. However, care must be taken not to send conflicting information whenever possible. One of the most common sources of conflicting data is character codes or ISOs. Character codes were implemented to help automated software or other equipment have an easier time with translation, and are also used by search engines or similar purposes. For example, most websites in the US serving content in English will give the following character :

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

However, websites in France serving content in French will usually serve the following character code:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

To make the character code issues more complicated, character codes can be served by the web server, CMS, or HTML code. Serving a single page with conflicting data, makes it difficult for the search engine to determine what is the most appropriate selection. The issue can be more complex, by serving different parts of the website with different character codes. For international Seo is worth taking the time to research and find the most appropriate character code. Look at the top results for some of your keywords and try to determine charater codes they are serving. You can check which character codes with various header tools, such as the one and SeoConsultants.com.  For more information on character codes should consult the W3C Internationalization guide.
Another indicator used by search engines is the IP of the web host. Search engines, particularly Google are relying less and less on this factor, as the economics of hosting in different countries, plays a role. However, if you’re having difficulty ranking in a specific country, choosing a hosting company with an IP range in that country, may be helpful.
Another tool you can use to tell search engines about the preferred country you want your content to be indexed in, comes from the search engines themselves. Google Webmaster Central gives you the option to tell them which country your content is most relevant to.

Microsoft Webmaster Center also gives you some data about how they are intrpreting your content, however they don’t allow you to manually specify a region.

Another indicator that search engines, use are inbound links from other domains. Having a large number of links from pages in a specific language, or with specific country specific TLD’s, have been shown to have some influence on international rankings. So if you are having difficulty ranking in a specific language or region, creating content that will generate links, or reaching out to other webmasters, who are already ranking in those TLD’s or languages, would be a worthwhile effort.
As you can see international Seo is a complicated process, something that should be for about a plan beforehand. For more information about international Seo be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed.

International SEO has many different aspects, in this first of a multipart series we will be looking at one of those aspects, language versus geographic region.

People who are new to international SEO often confuse language with geographic regions. For example they assume that French is only used by people searching from France. However French is also spoken in Canada, Belgium, and Monaco. So when working in international SEO one of the first and most important steps is to make that distinction between these two areas.

Content that pertains to a specific geographic region, such as a restaurant located near the Eiffel Tower, would be content that is geographically important. Content that is in a specific language, such as an instruction manual, is not geographically important. It is however possible to have content which is geographically important, and language specific. For example, a restaurant located near the Eiffel Tower, may wish to offer content in several languages, for tourists visiting the country who don’t speak French.

For content where the country or geographic region is important, the optimal implementation is to use a country code TLD (i.e. .co.uk,.fr, or .de). Many websites will own more than one TLD, but use the most geographically appropriate one as their main site (IE owning the.com but using the.co.uk for their content). For websites with content in more than one region and more than one TLD, a geographic IP location tool is suggested. This tool will determine the country of origin of the visitor, and direct them to the appropriate TLD. However you should allow the user to manually override this decision, in case of error or user preference.

One of the disadvantages of using multiple TLD’s is you are spreading the link equity across multiple domains, decreasing the overall trust of the domain within the search algorithm. Additionally if you aren’t careful you can prevent indexing of multiple TLD’s if they aren’t interlinked properly. A suggested implementation is putting a country selector on the homepage of the .com, which redirects the user’s to the appropriate TLD after the user makes a selection. However be sure to provide a search engine friendly text link to each of the country specific TLD’s, currently most search engines have some difficulty with submitting forms. To overcome this disadvantage, subdomains, or subfolders can be used. A hybrid solution involves setting up a country specific TLD, that links to subdomains or subfolders, on the main TLD.

For websites where language is the primary factor not geography, subdomains or subfolders are generally used. For example you could use en.example.com and fr.example.com or example.com/en and example.com/fr. The main deciding factor is usually the organization and managemnt structure of the company. If the company operates a very strict rigid manner, or all of the content is controlled from a central office subfolders is typically easier to implement and maintain. If each language operates under a different set of guidelines or management, subdomains are generally easier to administer and implement. Using subdomains does have the disadvantage of dividing up the link equity, but it’s not as dramatic as different TLD’s.

If the content of the website is non-technical, includes a lot of marketing, or any other cultural references, it’s generally suggested to have unique content written in each language. Using translation services may introduce misinterpretations, or language specific issues. From a duplicate content perspective, search engines currently do not have the ability to detect duplicate content across multiple languages.

One common mistake many websites make is to use flag icons to represent languages. This can present a problem and create user dissatisfaction in the case of popular languages. For example Spanish is spoken in many countries around the world, but using an icon of the flag of Spain might not be useful to someone in Mexico or Guatemala.

As you can see international SEO introduces many problems, and in this first article, we hope we’ve given you a better perspective to better understand and solve some of the complex issues. Stay subscribed to our RSS feed for follow-up articles on this topic.