Posted on November 1, 2009 by elmanufico
Following my previous post, let me talk about the specificities related to the project management in international and multilingual SEO projects. As promised, I also want to discuss here problems that may arise in international SEO.
Just like Google wants to make the world’s information universally accessible, it is up to the SEO manager to make local information as relevant as possible for his client’s target audience. This is why it is extremely important that local information is managed by a local SEO consultant. This consultant will be able to tell you if the selected keywords are the most searched ones by internet users. I therefore strongly disagree with consultants who suggest that using translation softwares would do the trick. In most cases it won’t .
So, the organisation of international SEO project should be as follows:
1. Project management
- Technical optimisation: the backoffice should the same for all language / country versions in most cases. This should be handled by the same consultant / project manager / IT dpt. depending your internal structure.
- Content optimisation: following the lead of the project manager and his recommendation on the content strategy, each local consultant should handle his part and make sure that the right keywords are used everywhere in the website.
- Popularity/linkbuilding: partnerships with other websites is a very local task and one should have a deep knowledge and understanding of the local market to make the right recommendations or contact the right websites.
- Project management / reporting: the most important this to do is match the structure of the compagny you’re working for. Is it highly centralised or does each local team on the client’s end want a local report? Those are the kind of questions to ask but in any case everybody in the company needs to know what’s going on and communication is key here
2. Problems in international SEO
- Unique URL: one URL should be dedicated for one content. You should recommend working with specific subdomain or folder. If you want to work with language parameters, make sure this parameter is always shown in the URL, and that your content does not appear in 2 different languages for the same URL.
- IP vs. browser delivery: It’s an excellent idea to show different content to internet user based on their location or language preference. I advise you to opt for redirection based on the language of the user’s browser, because IP-to-country tools may not always give you the right country for the right IP…
- IP delivery: Do you still want to opt for the IP redirection? You may, only if you make sure that you don’t do cloaking. Like what Google says, don’t consider GoogleBot coming from one specific country. GoogleBot mostly comes with US IP addresses, which means that it should see exactly the same content as a US user. If you use IP redirection for specific location within the same country, you’ll need to make sure that you don’t create duplicate content.
Don’t hesitate to drop comments or questions, have a great end of weekend. Follow me on twitter for more news!
Filed under: seo | Tagged: geolocalisation, geolocalization, googlewebmastertool, internationalseo, nielsen, search, searchenginemarketshares, searchengineoptimisation, seo | 1 Comment »
Posted on October 24, 2009 by elmanufico
Being specialised in international SEO among other things, I wanted to provide a quick heads up about it because there are not so many resources on the web. In this post I’ll start with giving you information on search engine market shares in the world, then geo-targeting. In the next post (part II), I’ll cover project organisation, and finally, point out issues that may arise, complete with Google’s opinion about it. Needless to say that geo-targeting China – if your website is not in Chinese – may be a bit of a tough game…
- Search engine market shares:
Nielsen Netratings and comescore usually provides monthly reports on market shares. I found this website pretty useful when you want to get quick answers about top search engines in top countries in terms of number of internet users. I’m keen to find out more about free stats online, so please let me know if you have ideas, especially about market shares in Africa and Asia.
- Geo targeting in SEO:
- Search engine tools: you may want to use Google Webmaster tool and select the right country for your website. This works for any website structure, meaning that you can list not only domains but sub-domains or folders. For instance, you may list example.com/fr/ for France and example.com/de/ for Germany within the same Google account. But in this case, you’ll have to verify both URLs within the tool.
- Domain extension: search engines and Google in particular currently take into account the extension of your domain. So domain.fr will be taken as a sign that the website may be French, whereas domain.ca will be regarded as a Canadian website. In this case, you will usually see that the area within Google Webmaster tool has been selected by default.
- Meta tags: some meta tags have been created for geo-localisation purpose only. The main ones are country and language tags, but you may also want to put some more to make sure search engines understand which country you target. For instance, if you target the UK:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”EN-GB”>
<meta name=”country” content=”United Kingdom”>
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”51.51225;-0.13326″ />
<meta name=”geo.country” content=”GB” />
<meta name=”ICBM” content=”51.51225;-0.13326″ />
- IP address: Google takes the IP address of your website into account. So if you host your website in another country, it may indeed turn into using a foreign IP address. It’s always good to Google “what’s my ip” and then “ip 2 country” and you’ll get your IP address and the country it is linked to.
- Linkbuilding: inlinks to your website should come from the targeted country. Indeed, does it make sense to say you’re targeting the UK if all your backlinks come from the US?
Enjoy your weekend, and see you in a couple of days with part II.
Filed under: seo | Tagged: geolocalisation, geolocalization, googlewebmastertool, internationalseo, nielsen, se, search, searchenginemarketshares, searchengineoptimisation | 8 Comments »
Posted on October 17, 2009 by elmanufico
After well-diserved summer holidays in Indonesia, Indonesian language classes with my wife, outings with friends taking advantage of the last bits of warm temperature in Paris before next spring, and waves of works smashing away in September and October (argh…), I find my blog slowly but surely….. stagnant.
Enough is enough and time has come to restart. I want to have a broader approach on anything I publish online and reflect on what is left to blog. On top of that, I had to admit I am not blogging for money; I have a full time job (also related to the internet) and also an offline-life (you know, off the screen). I therefore decided to organise my publications into:
- Twitter. This medium is shorter but faster. I tweet all the interesting stuff I see around, adding a few comments everytime I see an opportunity. I’m there almost 24/7 and interact with followers and other twitterers on interesting subject. I therefore consider it as my main channel to the world!
- Google Reader. It has its own public URL and it is therefore possible to share interesting things. I usually share a couple of articles per day.
- Delicious. I use it less and less but it’s always good to bookmark useful websites.
- Digg. I use it more and more because I consider this tool more effective to bookmark articles. I usually digg and tweet the most interesting articles I see.
- Friendfeed. This is an aggregator. So you’ll see all my internet trace there. I don’t use it often as a channel, although it is possible to comment and “like” anything posted.
And then comes my blog … I’ll use it only when I want to go deeper into something that catches my attention or in cases where I just don’t find the information I need. So why don’t I believe in monthly and weekly digest anymore then? Well, of course, because Google does it better than me 
Bon weekend !
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Posted on March 17, 2009 by elmanufico
Posted on January 27, 2009 by elmanufico
I’m using so much Google toolbar that I don’t even go to the Google homepage anymore. Did you notice that the link to Google Chrome no longer exists and has been replaced by a link to Google Sites?
It seems like Google is trying to promote the web for all those out there who have no websites yet. The target being clearly individuals and Small & Medium Enterprises. It reminds me of the former attempt with the so-called Google Pages which didn’t last for too long. Is this service going to turn internet users into new webmasters? We have reasons to think so:
- This new service brings new features such a site-level navigation and headers which are really easy to use and definitely bring more interest to Google Site.
- Internet users are becoming more internet savvy
- Google gained a good experience through Blogger and added network services such as Google friends that make the whole package
- Google is really willing to do so as it would increase its potential network of Adsense friendly websites.
Meanwhile, I tested for a few seconds and i have to say that:
- It has nothing brilliant compared to websites specialised in it.
- It is a bit hard to understand where to click. I mean, would anybody who never ever created a website understand this:
- It is far from being the first Google’s product outside search and most of them never really succeeded. Does anybody remember the last time you used Picassa or Orkut??
Let me know your thoughts!
Filed under: online marketing | Tagged: google, googleproduct, googlesites, webmaster | 4 Comments »
Posted on January 12, 2009 by elmanufico
As you all may know, Google’s motto and long-term business objective is to make the world’s information universally accessible. Knowing this, it is easier to understand what may happen in the next months, or at least, what goal Google will pursue. One of the outcomes is that the world’s number one search engine can and will index more and more types of content. Therefore, technical optimisations in SEO are still important, but no longer weight as much as content and popularity.
The year or 2008 was undoubtly content-oriented. In addition to simply creating content for users, the year witnessed more usage of rich media (optimised images, news, videos, products, etc). It was also linkbuilding-oriented. We all promoted websites through partnerships and Social Media Optimisation in addition to on-page optimisations. The year 2009 will probably be all the same. Specificaly, you may want to get ready for Audio indexing by optimising the audio content of your videos. Well, we should actually be ready, because audio content will probably be very hard to optimise when Google decides to include it in its universal search. Nevertheless, I want to point out today that there is something new to take into account: local search marketing. Although it’s still in its early phase, advertisers are expected to triple the money they spend in local search marketing within 2 years, according to the Marketing Sherpa latest release.
Local search marketing can be divided into local search, geolocalisation and mobile search. The difference between geolocalisation and local search is about who excludes content based on geographical location. For geolocalisation, advertisers choose to promote content that is in relation with where the targeted internet user lives. The variable is the IP address of the internet user’s computer. Local search is different, in the sense that internet users are the ones deciding to add the name of a location in the query. For instance, I actively search locally when I Google pizza paris. Finally, mobile search comes into play through GPS – most mobile search engines now include GPS tracking and serve results based on your localisation – and the behaviour of users of mobile devices – they intend to search more local stuff surrounding them vs. internet users behind the screen of their pc’s.
I’ll go in depth into each of these 3 elements in the next posts Happy new year to all of you and do not hesitate to post comments on local search marketing if you feel like it!
Filed under: seo | Tagged: geolocalisation, google, Googlemobile, GPS, local, localsearch, mobilesearch | Leave a Comment »
