Are you considering expanding your market overseas? Have you thought about how to make your website do well in international search engines? Here are some points you will have to consider.
Domain Name
For international SEO, it is recommended to have a TLD (top level domain) for each country you're targeting. You may find this difficult as some countries require that you have an actual physical business location in that country before you can obtain a TLD. Ideally your domain name will have the correct extension for each country for example www.website.com.au (Aus), www.website.com.ca (Canada) and www.website.com.uk (UK). If someone is searching in Canada, on google.ca, Google figures that domains with .ca extension would be a better result for them.
Hosting
Search engines such as Google look at the host location (IP) of websites in an effort to deliver the most relevant results for the searcher. Therefore it is also recommended to host your unique TLDs in each country. This means that if you're targeting the UK, you will need a .uk website and host it in the UK.
Content and Language
If you decide to implement the above two strategies, then it will also be worth your while to ensure content is written in the correct language. Some companies may consider taking the easy option and only target English-speaking audiences but this may be a huge mistake. Search engines such as Google will be looking for languages that match the domain name and those that match this criteria will do better in results pages. If translating the content seems too large a task, the least you should do is to identify the language with the Meta tag: When adding content to your other websites, try to avoid using an exact copy as search engines may penalise you for having duplicate content.
Another important factor to remember in the content is to make sure that you include street addresses within the country and preferably add these to each page.
Inbound Links
As with SEO in general, links are an important factor in getting your website ranking well with search engines. To do well overseas, a website will need to obtain inbound links from the sites in the country you are targeting. Make sure these links are in the correct language and include your keywords in the anchor text.
Geo Target Your Site with Google Webmaster Tools
In Google Webmaster Tools, there is an option to associate a website with a particular country in order to enhance its presence in the local search results To do this, set up your Google Webmaster Tools account and click on the correct country in the Settings area. To read more about this refer to this link.
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