When I was in Paris earlier this month, I met the SEO Director of NetBooster, Stéphanie Sallée. We went to a typical French café and talked about the search market in France. (more…)
Last week I attended the inaugural Dublin SEO Summit, a free half-day conference held in the Morrison Hotel in the centre of Dublin (not to be confused with the upcoming Dublin Web Summit).
The headline speaker of the SEO event was SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin, who was on a whirlwind tour of the whole of Ireland and taking time out of his schedule to perform several speaking gigs (only a few days earlier we hosted a Belfast Digital Marketing meetup for him). (more…)
Search engines guide what search marketers do – their rules, guidelines and incessant updates all play a role in shaping strategies and recommendations – and often result in a lot of headaches and expletives. But how often do you look at what strategies and tactics the search engines are using to grow their own business? After all, search engines are businesses- international businesses – that want to increase their customer base and make a profit (and we know they certainly do that).
Rather than just reacting to updates and additions to tweak campaigns and websites, monitoring what the search engines are doing and where they’re going can provide useful insights into what is going to be important and effective in global marketing.
Over the next couple of posts, I’ll take a closer look at what Google, Yandex and Baidu are focusing on and how that can help us with our own global efforts. Today, I’m specifically looking at their choices and strategy when it comes to international expansion. (more…)
Google have recently added (in May 2012) another method to implement rel=alternate, hreflang=x to appropriately geotarget your websites, allowing you to tell them about your content for different regions and setting the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” with an XML sitemap. This is a simpler way of implementing multilanguage and multinational websites as it reduces the amount of development time and page code.
However, when Pete Handley at the Media Flow was asked to implement the hreflang tag on a site containing different versions of content for different countries, he found that there were no tools to help, and the HREFLANG sitemap tool was born…
Google’s engineer Pierre Far has been very active in the past year being an advocate for Google and for ‘Good SEO’. He has been speaking on many different conferences, he has been active on Google+ and he has been doing a lot of Webmaster Central “Office Hours” hangouts.
In these hangouts Pierre (or another Googler) discusses a specific topic. He explains what Google is doing and he answers question. A very informative way of connecting to the search industry. If you ever have the chance on joining one of the hangouts I would suggest you do, it can be informative.
Last week Pierre Far had a Webmastercentral Hangout about a topic which has been on the agenda for many lately: multinational and multilingual sites. You can watch the hangout below. (more…)
As you may have noticed, Geo-targeting is ‘hot’. We talked about the new Linkdex functionality recently and last week at SES San Francisco it was a much discussed topic as well. But there is more!
Ask any international search marketer what they find most challenging about international SEO, and there’s a good chance they’ll say geo-targeting. Deciding between local domains or subdomains, choosing local hosting or not, managing duplication issues across languages – the list goes on. Google attempted to alleviate some of the geo-targeting pain by introducing the hreflang tag to improve the targeting of international websites and ensure users are presented with their local version – yet for many it has proved confusing and complex. (more…)
A few months ago the International SEO School launched. And the school (on which I myself am also a trainer) decided it wanted to give some extra attention to talents so it gave away two scholarships. We received a lot of applications and in the end there were two winners who both attended the first series of the SEO School in Barcelona.
The two winners were asked to share their experiences of their week in Barcelona. And both of them did. Below you can find the experiences of Michael Rurup Andersen and Gary Wells. They share what they have learned and why it benefitted them. Enjoy! (more…)
SES San Francisco is coming up next week and I will personally be there for several reasons. First of all I will be making videos there, together with our friends from Linkdex. But I will not just be there for State of Search, but also as one of the ‘experts’ on the Roundtable forums. I will be talking there about international search and differences in international SEO.
So you can see that the ‘theme’ for SES San Francisco in my case is very much focussed on international differences, Geo location, something Pete Young talked about yesterday as well. And for that I would like your help, to make something really nice for SES San Francisco. (more…)
The BBC reports that in China three employees of Baidu, the biggest search engine of China and by many seen as a possible ‘Google killer’ once they would expand, have been arrested “on suspicion of having accepted bribes to delete posts from its forum service”.
The three, together with a fourth employee, were fired by Baidu when it became clear they had deleted posts in return for money, but now they also were arrested for this. Apparently they accepted thousands of euros in return for the deletion of certain posts. (more…)
If you’re developing international versions of your website, you’re probably hoping to reach a large number of potential users and most likely are investing a lot of money and resource going into getting them up and running. So you want to make sure that you’re giving your international audience the best possible experience on your website; one that will make them relate to your brand, enjoy their experience and ultimately complete whatever action it is you want them to.
To do that, in an international context, you need to think about more than just translating your content. Sure, that is a pretty major step and a huge factor in convincing your multilingual audience that you’re a viable and relevant option for them but it’s not enough on its own.
Here are a few scenarios where missing a piece of the localisation process, could, and in most cases would, result in failure. (more…)
International SEO is becoming more and more important in a world which is communicating more and more via online channels and thus becoming smaller. There are many things to consider. Time for an outline of all the steps necessary to consider and undertake when embracing global search marketing. (more…)
When the International SEO School was first announced we were pleasantly surprised by the number of positive reactions. Now the first series has already taken place, with a lot of enthusiastic responses.
Also when we sent out the possibility to get a scholarship for the International SEO School we didn’t expect to get that many applications. You can surely say: international SEO is ‘hot’.
Now it is time to announce the winners of the scholarship!
The organization of the International SEO School decided on the two winners for this scholarship:
Congratulations to these two lucky people!
Did you miss out? Or forgot to apply? Take a look at the upcoming series of the International SEO School and keep an eye out here for more scholarship options, the school is likely to offer scholarships again in the future.
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