Best Practices for Multilanguage/Country Targeting

Many businesses target multiple countries with their websites and need answers to questions
such as: do you put the information for your products or services all on the same domain? Do
you obtain multiple domains? Where do you host the site(s)? It turns out that there are SEO
factors, as well as basic marketing questions, that affect the answers. There are also non-SEO
factors, such as the tax implications of what you do; for some TLDs you can get them only by
having a local physical presence (e.g., France requires this to get a .fr domain).

Targeting a Specific Country
Starting with the basics of international targeting, it is important to let the search engines know
where your business is based in as many ways as possible. These might include:
• A country-specific TLD (ccTLD) for your domain (e.g., .co.uk)
• Hosting in the local country
• Physical local address in plain text on every page of your site
• Google Webmaster Central geotargeting setting
• Verified address with Google Maps
• Links from in-country websites
• Use of the local language on the website
If you are starting from scratch, getting these all lined up will give you the best possible chance
of ranking in the local country you are targeting.

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Tying SEO to Conversion and ROI

it is important to tie your SEO campaign to the
results it brings to the business. A fundamental piece of that is measuring the conversions
driven by organic SEO traffic. Here are some of the most common types of conversions:

Sales/sales revenue
This is the one that everyone assumes is part of conversions. Sales and sales revenue (or
better still, margin) conversions can be the simplest things to track, except when you are
selling many different products at different price points and in different quantities. In this
case, the process would need to be a bit more sophisticated.
If your site is advertising-driven, you need to look at the impact of organic search traffic
on advertising revenue. If you have no financial goals for your site, you need to look at
some of the other types of conversions.

Email/blog/newsletter subscriptions
Anytime a user signs up to receive regular communications from you it is a win. Even
though there are not direct financial consequences to this it is still a conversion. Someone
who has subscribed to something you offer is more likely to become a customer than a
first-time visitor to your site, so you need to credit this type of conversion.

Sign-ups
Closely related to the notion of subscriptions are other types of sign-ups. Perhaps you offer
a service such as a tool that people need to sign up for to use. Even if the tool is free, you
should track this as a conversion.

You most likely received the person’s email address in the process, and even if she indicates
that she does not want to receive commercial communications from you, you should be
building loyalty with the tool you provided her access to (or whatever she signed up for);
otherwise, why would you be providing her that service?

Downloads
Many sites offer free downloads, such as white papers, or free downloadable tools. Even
if you do not require a sign-up of any type, you should still count this as a conversion.
You are getting your message out there with the downloads you offer.

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SEO for Mindshare/Branding

A less popular but equally powerful application of SEO is its use for branding purposes.
Bloggers, social media/community websites, content producers, news outlets, and dozens of
other web publishing archetypes have found tremendous value in appearing atop search results
and using the resulting exposure to bolster their brand recognition and authority.

The process is fairly simple, much like the goals in traditional advertising of ad repetition to
enter the buyer’s consideration set. (Read about the three laws of branding at http://www
.palgrave-journals.com/bm/journal/v16/n3/full/2550139a.html for more information on this topic.)
Similarly, online marketers have observed that being at the top of search rankings around a
particular subject has a positive impact on traffic, consideration, and perceived authority.
Here are some factors to think about when considering SEO for mindshare/branding:
 
When to employ
Use it when branding, or communicating a message, is your goal. If you do not have direct
monetization goals for the moment or for the foreseeable future, this is the approach for
you.
 
Keyword targeting
A keyword focus is less critical here—you’ll likely have a few broad terms that receive the
high traffic you want, but the long tail may be far more achievable and the better target.
Focus on keywords that are going to bring you visitors who are likely to be interested in
and remember your brand.

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Algorithm-Based Ranking Systems: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

Understanding how crawling, indexing, and ranking works is helpful to SEO practitioners, as
it helps them determine what actions to take to meet their goals. This section primarily covers
the way Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft operate, and does not necessarily apply to other search
engines that are popular, such as Baidu (China) and Naver (Korea).
The search engines have several major goals and functions.
These include:
     • Crawling and indexing the billions of documents (pages and files) accessible on the Web
      • Responding to user queries by providing lists of relevant pages
In this section, we’ll walk through the basics of these functions from a nontechnical
perspective. This section will start by discussing how search engines find and discover content.

Crawling and Indexing
Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system. Each stop is
its own unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPEG, or other file). The
search engines need a way to “crawl” the entire city and find all the stops along the way, so
they use the best path available: the links between web pages

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Elements of Link Building

There are countless opportunities for link building. Everything starts on your site. Your
site should make it easy and intuitive for anyone wanting to link to it. To increase your
chances of people linking to your site, you need to provide something of value.
Basic Elements
The following subsections talk about the rudimentary elements that all sites need to
consider.

Take out the guesswork
Take out the guesswork for your web visitors by providing the HTML code fragment(s)
for people to link to your site. Create “Link to Us” and “Tell a Friend” links. Most CMS
software includes prebuilt forms for handling these simple concepts.

Run a daily, weekly, or monthly email newsletter
Running your own newsletter provides several benefits. First, you get to remind your
existing visitors of your new offerings, whether it is content, products, or services. Plus,
the recipients of your newsletter are likely to forward it to people they know if they find
your newsletter interesting.

Provide registered services
Many sites offer free and members-only content. This model offers several benefits. If
your free content is already great, many of your visitors will also be interested in your
members-only content. The idea is that the content that is provided to members only
is of even greater quality than the public content. Many sites charge for members-only
content. Providing registered services helps you build up the email lists

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Use Intelligent Page Formatting For Seo

Try using smaller paragraphs with mixed-case text. Use boldface, italics, uppercase,
and different text color variations for emphasis. Employ browser-safe fonts such as
Times New Roman, Georgia (serif font), Arial, Helvetica, or Verdana (sans serif font).
Strategically employ bulleted lists, headings, and subheadings for clarity and information
organization. Using these options is helpful from an SEO perspective. Furthermore,
employ sufficient alignments, whitespace, and text padding for additional clarity
and web page look and feel.

Be mindful of web-safe colors. Use high-contrast color schemes for clarity and ease of
reading. Be consistent with colors. Don’t use too many colors. Try to stay away from
image backgrounds.

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Video Sitemaps Seo

Video Sitemaps are yet another extension of XML Sitemap Protocol. Video Sitemaps
can be helpful if your videos show up in Google SERPs. The following fragment shows
a basic video Sitemap with one example video:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://mydomain.com/article23423.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://mydomain.com/videos/article23423.flv
</video:content_loc>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
For simplicity reasons, just one video is listed with only the single optional tag of
<video:content_loc>. You can use many other optional tags to further classify videos.
For more information on all the optional video tags,

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Using Analytics As a Business Case for SEO

You can use a properly structured plan as the business case for an SEO project. The way to do
this is to express the target results of an SEO project in terms of financial impact. You could
include a variety of metrics in a business case,
such as:
• Revenue
• Lead generation
• Margin
• Branding value
• Reach
• Other action triggers (newsletter sign-ups, contact requests, demo requests, free-trial
acceptance, viewing a specific piece of content, etc.)
Measuring such things requires that you tie organic search engine visits to the revenue and
other conversions that result.

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Why Measuring Success Is Essential to the SEO Process

Although quantifying deliverables and measuring progress are important for external reporting
purposes, it is just as important for SEO practitioners to measure the efficacy of their own efforts
to make timely adjustments as necessary. As you will see in this chapter, numerous tools are
available to aid in this process.

At the beginning of any SEO project it is wise to establish baseline data points for the website.
This includes the following:
• Quantifying organic search traffic by search engine and keyword
• Quantifying a baseline of the major keywords that are driving traffic by search engine
• Quantifying a breakout of what sections are getting the current organic search traffic by
search engine and keyword
• Quantifying data on conversions broken down by search engine and keyword
• Identifying poorly performing pages
• Tracking search engine crawler activity on the site
• Determining the number of indexed pages
• Identifying 404 error pages and external sites linking to these pages, if any
Remember: you cannot methodically improve what you cannot measure.
Defining and mapping the path toward concrete goals are crucial aspects of the SEO process—
and over time, some goals may change. Therefore, it is also important to make sure the data
you capture helps you understand your progress against these goals.

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Google Quality Guidelines: Search engine spam

Hidden text Using invisible text specifically tailored to search engine spiders
Cloaking Presenting different content for the same URL to the web user and the search engine spider
Sneaky redirects Using JavaScript to redirect web users to a page they did not expect, usually one that is unrelated to their
search query
Irrelevant keywords Employing techniques such as keyword stuffing
Duplicate content Using the same content on numerous domains or subdomains
Badware Using malicious tactics including phishing (pretending to be another site) and malware software
(installable on the victim’s PC)
Doorway pages Pages designed specifically for search engines to rank for certain search terms. Typically, doorway pages
include a redirect to the target page of interest

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