Online marketing business intelligence

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…

1. 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.
2. 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