International SEO - Part 1

Before you setup any website in another country you need to consider many variables, today in the first of 2 parts I will give you some hints and tips about what to do before you setup the website and before you even start to SEO an international website.

Domain

Ideally you want to get a website that has a TLD from that country, a .com site does work well worldwide but we do recommend getting the local TLD.

The other issue with the domain is that if you can, make sure that it is hosted in the country where you want it to rank; so host your .fr in France and your .de in Germany (although this can get tough when you are running multiple language pages from the one TLD). Basically we try and do this because the search engines try and find relevant content for their users, so to them, a French hosted (and .fr) website is much preferable to a French internet user.

Geo-Targeting

There are 3 different options you can use with your new international site; a brand new top level domain (12345.de), a subfolder for each of your new sites (12345.com/de) or a sub domain for each new site (de.12345.com). Here is a brief overview of the benefits and potential negatives of each option;

The Hreflang Tag

If you are running all your language pages from the one TLD domain than you need to think about using the Hreflang tag, that is a tag that tells the search engines that you are running multiple language pages on the one site. With this tag you can run both different languages from the one site, as well as different dialects of the one language (eg. Germany and Switzerland) and the search engines will be aware that the content is simply translated similar content on the same site and not ‘dangerous’ duplicate content. Here is a short example of how the Hreflang tag works;

We will run 4 languages from the website 1234.com; German, Swiss German, a generic English and British English.
You will need to add all this code with the equivalent URL’s of the different language pages between yourtags to all URL’s on your website, you can see how the tag differentiates between both the land and the local language;

You are also able to submit your hreflanf tags in your sitemap, read about that more here

The Canonical Tag

Another tool to try and get rid of the dreaded duplicate content demon

Find out more about the Canonical tag here.

Language

The language is naturally one of the first things you must think about when running an international SEO campaign, and when I say language I mean to use the proper local language. It is vitally important to get a native speaker (or a very fluent speaker) to write the content for your international site; this is both for the search engines of that country as well as for the benefit of the users from that country that will come to your site. I think we have all been to a site that was clearly just a bad translation… and left within the first 20 seconds.

And please… please DO NOT use Google translate – Offerwise you find dat will rankings will not good very come in ur site! (and some direct translated text can be classified as spam).

Allow all users to access every language version of your website regardless of where they live, do this by adding a drop down menu somewhere on your site. This also makes it easier for the search engines bots (Googlebot etc) to crawl through your entire website regardless of language.

If you are going to run multiple languages from your website (either on the same domain or like us with multiple country domains) make sure the dropdown link that changes languages is in the language of that site; for example De or Deutsch not Ger or German.

Last but not least you have to make sure all the Meta tags and titles on the website are in the local language, this is a small but important detail that can be overlooked when making a new language site.

Local Symbols/Customs

I really had no idea what heading I should use for this section, but what I mean when I say symbols and customs are things like; date format, time format, day format, currencies and the grammar of a number – these are more for the beneficial of the user than the search engines… but everything counts.

Here is a bit of an example of what can wrong with these ‘customs’ when translating an American website for the German market;

Keep reading at Part two