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!

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.

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 !

1. New or useful apps :
   • backtweets: if you are used to  looking for backlinks of your website or those of your competitors, you won’t be surprised with this feature for the twittersphere. If you are not, you may be interested in looking for twitter profiles that link to a specific URL for one main reason: apart from the fact that each profile has a PageRank, you may want to know how a specific URL spreads into Twitter. This is a good indication on how good your buzz strategy is.
   • Twist: just like Google trends, this application gives a clear indication of the trends of specific keywords and expressions on Twitter. This application also has a feature that aims to compare keywords.
   • Tweetreach: this is my favourite! This application shows how many people are exposed to a twitt. Not only giving the information on the number of retweets (RT) or backlinks, it also provides the number of impressions. For instance, I twitted a link to an article on how the internet had shortages recently after reading a very interesting post from Christopher Mingryan. The graph below shows how many people have actually seen the twitt and the contribution of each Twitterer in exposing the twitt:
     

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   • Friend or Follow: this website is really simple but will save you time! This enables you to know who you follow but does not follow you back! Export it as CSV!
2. case studies:
   • Many case studies available online show the various strategies that have so  far been successful. The presentation below sums it up very well according to my point of view:

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   • Last of all, the squarespace case is very important and shows that monitoring its network on social media is also hugely important. Squarespace has been successful in reaching thousands of people promoting its brand only by offering 1 Iphone GS per day for 30 days… To be part of this lottery, one only had to send a post with “#squarespace” in it. A Twitter search shows that “#squarespace” is currently beeing twitter 15 times every 8 minutes:
     

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   Voila! Hope this post helps all those who want to start the Twitter journey or go further with their knowledge on this. As a reminder, you may also want to follow me on my Twitter profile where I’m way more active than in my blog! Happy belated independance day to my US readers.

   Quick edit [6th July 2009]: I also advise that you take a look at the moonfruit case and the Dell Offers Followers Specials but do not try to get as many followers as possible through spamming because it’ll probably do more bad than good to you in the long run.

• Google: Apart from showing the disappointing financial results for Q1, Google changed its algorithm as usual but for once, it made the changes public. First, site links are now widespread on the search engine result pages. The main impact will be that each website has more space and more links in the Search Engine Result Page  (SERP). This would surely lead to a higher Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for websites whose content matches better what internet users look for. Secondly, SERP are now more local and geolocalised. Indeed, Google may use your latest local queries typed in the Google toolbar and responds to queries such as “japanese restaurant” with a map from Google Maps.  This is indeed very interesting because Google goes one step further into personalised results. It also shows that optimising your website into Local Business ads is  a must now more than ever. Finally, on top of offering the geocalised suggest feature and local news feature, which recently expanded to the UK, India and Canada, Google changed its URLs in the SERP. It means that more parameters will be available. Here is the example presented in the Google blog:

Old URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search
New URL: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The difference in parameters is the following:

——- old

http://www.google.com/search

hl=en
q=flowers
btnG=Google+Search

——- new

http://www.google.com/url

sa=t
source=web
ct=res
cd=7
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN
rct=j
q=flowers
usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w
sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

The impact if the “cd” parameter is huge, as now, one can track the ranking of his website for each keyword bringing traffic to the website. See how you can do it here (in French) or here (in English).

• Mobile Search: Google released its latest Gmail version. This is a pretty good one as it is faster and uses the Gears technology (yep, you can access your mails even when you have no signal). Google Maps is getting closer and closer from Maps Quest. It seems that Google will already be number one for all vertical search features by the time the internet is available on each and every mobile device.
  

  Google Maps gets closer from Mapquest

• SMO and Twitter: It seems that Twitter makes most of the news for the SMO world. To follow the latest news, follow my bookmarks on the topic: Delicious/twitter

Voila! To stay updated on the latest news, you may want to follow me on twitter, or follow my rss, my delicious or all my feeds on friendfeed.

Have a fruitful week!

An update to my former post about twitter thanks to one of the comments I received, I wanted to point out how to boost your traffic for newly created brands or businesses. Because you cannot count on the notoriety of you brand, you need to make it happen:

• by using seo-friendly keywords in relation to your business (use google keyword suggestion + google trends tool)
• by using the search feature + twitter apps such as twilert.com (sends you on a regular basis a summary of discussions on a particular keyword) and follow people who speak about the same things as you.
• by using twitterfeed with more than one profile to send updates from your site/ blog on a regular basis and categorise them into various feeds (just like RSS). Please note that you should not use it too much in order not spam the whole network …
• by using feeds aggregators and check for stuff which are currently massively retweeted, digged, delicioused, etc. This is very important because the more stuff you find – stuff in relation with your business that buzzes around – the more people will twitt it again and again. The main purpose behind it would be to make your twitter profile famous as retweets always include your profile name. It looks like this:



There is also a very interesting post on how to use feed aggregators right here. The biggest ones being friendfeed, tweetmeme and popurls.

Is redirecting a lot of domains suspicious?

How Google considers Images through Google Images:

I also gathered a few tips:

• Keep the group active with a content in relation with your target audience:
  - it is important that you use at least one important keyword in your post
  - use the search feature, look for hot topics on twitter and twitt them
  - use the hashtags (“#”) to categorise the content. For instance, each and every post about seo should have #seo in it so other users can find your content.

• Promote the twitter group:
  - use the search feature, look for users who are interested in the same topic you’re working on in your website / blog, follow the profile and start a discussion / inform that you have content on your site in relation with what he/she likes
  - promote your twitter account everywhere you can, in your mail signature, your website, blog, etc.
• Create a branded template (layout)
  - it’ll help you be considered as a trustworthy player in the twitter world.

I’ll keep you posted for more news!

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!

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!