Online Marketing Blog

Internet marketing is solely driven by SEO or search engine optimization. SEO refers to the process of gaining an impressive rank in search engine listings. This is very important as it decides the fate of a business. If a website is not SEO-friendly, it cannot expect to rule the online world and achieve what it has set out to. For this reason, it is imperative to follow the cardinal rules of search engine optimization so that you can ensure maximum traffic for your website and increase your profit prospects.

1. A website should be designed keeping the SEO factor in mind. This means the website should be rich in text. Search engines always look for content in a site, not intricate designs or fancy graphics. A website containing adequate text guarantees high visibility in search engine listings.

2. While including title tags on your website, do not restrict it to only the home page. Rather, every page of the site should boast of a title tag. Also, relevant keywords should be used in the title tags in each page depending on what the specific page is all about.

3. Each page of your website should be optimized for a particular keyword or key phrase and those placed appropriately in the content and heading tags. Special attention has to be given to ascertain the content does not become over-stuffed with keywords. You can also italicize or bold the keywords since search engines instantly recognize such texts.

4. The website content has to be updated from time to time in order to stay afloat in the game of internet marketing. It should be highly relevant and keywords should be used very wisely. This is one of the most basic rules of SEO.

5. There are many people who become obsessed with the Page Rank system of Google thinking it to be directly related to the performance of a website. However, you should remember that well-written content and good SEO are the primary factors that contribute to the success of a website. A website with an impressive PR but poor content and SEO cannot survive for long.

6. Use of frames, JavaScript and flash should be avoided unless it is absolutely imperative. This is because they are not SEO friendly and can affect your ranking significantly.

7. There should be alt tags for all graphics and images used on the website. Relevant keywords ought to be used in the alt tags.

8. The site’s internal architecture deserves special attention. All internal pages of your website should be linked back to the sitemap and homepage. A well-formed internal linking structure and good sitemap can ensure all pages of a website being indexed by a search engine.

9. It is good to manually submit a website for inclusion in search engine but indexing can take a lot of time in such a case. That is why you should search for sites that permit ‘Do Follow’ links and boast of a forum or blog which is regularly updated and is reasonably popular. It should be checked whether the blog permits links in signatures, posts or profiles. The main keyword should be used as the anchor text. This will increase your site’s chance of getting indexed.

10. Quality back links have to be built up to your site for effective SEO. One-way links are the strongest ones in this regard. You can ask site owners to put your link on their websites, include your site in vital directories and so on.

SEO 911 is the name who writes this article for people as a free, informative and helpful publication.

Publish this article: The Cardinal Rules of SEO

Blogs are web logs; online dairies in other words. There are different platforms for it, but wordpress is totally dominating the market. One of the main reasons why blogs are so popular is because web developers started to develop blogs for themselves, which is why wordpress is one of the few free scripts out there that is actually good.

An important element of blogs is their usability; it is actually as easy as using a word document. On top of that they have all kinds of automated functions that help them to grow, like pings and trackbacks, which help to get links.

Then we get to the comments; although the blog owner can shut off the comments, they’re an essential part of a blog, especially for the success of blogs. After all Google still loves content; lots of content. And comments are extraordinary helpful, as it doesn’t cost the blog owner anything; somebody else is creating content on their blog for free; that’s good.

So that is basically the deal; you give them content and in return you get a link. But now we come to the problem; wordpress has installed a nofollow by default on all comment links, which is a horrible mistake on their side, but obviously they do not care, as it is still installed. A nofollow means just that; it a message to Google to say that the blog does not acknowledge the site it’s linking to; it distance itself from your site. Which is very selfish; they take your content which helps them and in return they tell Google that your site sucks. WordPress really does not get that.

Because of that only a very, very few blogs have dofollow links (about 0.2 %!!). That means that the blog owner has consciously installed an extra plugin to give you a real link.

It is all a matter of perception of course, while on one hand it so incredible unfair, short minded and selfish, almost criminal of wordpress to install a nofollow on all comment links; on the other hand; that is why most comments are wasted and why it is possible to make a huge difference by searching for the 0.2% of blogs that do not cheat on you with nofollow links, so you get those valuable links, there were your competition is not getting them.

This being said; the most important element to start with is to research for blogs that are first and foremost related to your site and then of course to select those few that actually give you a dofollow link. It is basically impossible to do so without using a specialized program because 99.8% of blogs use the nofollow tag. I wish I could give you a link for it, but I’m not allowed to so, but ok, I’m sure you know how to use Google to find it yourself.

Once you have your list of blogs that suits your site you can start commenting, but never forget that there’s a human being behind that blog. High quality blogs do not fall out of the sky, they have been created by somebody who has put a lot of time and effort in it; respect that. Make sure you actually read the blog, do some research if needed before you start writing and take part in the conversation, don’t just drop some BS in there; you will only end up in spam filters and once that happens it is game over!

1 little practical advice I can give you is to write your comment first in a word document, so you can do a little spell check on it, but even more so; to keep a copy. Many times something might go wrong when you submit and if so you lose the comment and have to write it again.

Although in theory you should get links from as many different IP’s as possible, there are 2 good reasons to keep using the same blog for many comments;

1) There are just not that many really good blogs out there that give dofollow links

2) As long we’re talking about quality blogs, they most likely have hundreds, perhaps even thousands of pages, so to have 10-20 or even 50 links from the same blog is just fine.

In other words, as long you take the research serious and start with a good list of blogs, blog commenting is a very effective way to get quality links and even direct traffic. While reading those posts, assuming you did your homework and you’re writing them in blogs related to your site; it’s something you should do anyway to stay in touch with your market.

Michiel Van Kets writes articles for Luminous SEO Companyand offers link building services, like blog commenting service. His team of SEO-experts spends a lot of time on the blog research to find high quality blogs. Blog commenting is not something that can be simply put in a single category, as it is possible to get anchor text links from blog commenting, the really high quality blogs usually do not allow anchor texts. The very best dofollow blogs usually only accept .your name and the homepage as a link.

Publish this article: Introduction To Blog Commenting For Beginners

By: Michiel Van Kets
Category: SEO

Blogs are web logs; online dairies in other words. There are different platforms for it, but wordpress is totally dominating the market. One of the main reasons why blogs are so popular is because web developers started to develop blogs for themselves, which is why wordpress is one of the few free scripts out there that is actually good.

An important element of blogs is their usability; it is actually as easy as using a word document. On top of that they have all kinds of automated functions that help them to grow, like pings and trackbacks, which help to get links.

Then we get to the comments; although the blog owner can shut off the comments, they’re an essential part of a blog, especially for the success of blogs. After all Google still loves content; lots of content. And comments are extraordinary helpful, as it doesn’t cost the blog owner anything; somebody else is creating content on their blog for free; that’s good.

So that is basically the deal; you give them content and in return you get a link. But now we come to the problem; wordpress has installed a nofollow by default on all comment links, which is a horrible mistake on their side, but obviously they do not care, as it is still installed. A nofollow means just that; it a message to Google to say that the blog does not acknowledge the site it’s linking to; it distance itself from your site. Which is very selfish; they take your content which helps them and in return they tell Google that your site sucks. WordPress really does not get that.

Because of that only a very, very few blogs have dofollow links (about 0.2 %!!). That means that the blog owner has consciously installed an extra plugin to give you a real link.

It is all a matter of perception of course, while on one hand it so incredible unfair, short minded and selfish, almost criminal of wordpress to install a nofollow on all comment links; on the other hand; that is why most comments are wasted and why it is possible to make a huge difference by searching for the 0.2% of blogs that do not cheat on you with nofollow links, so you get those valuable links, there were your competition is not getting them.

This being said; the most important element to start with is to research for blogs that are first and foremost related to your site and then of course to select those few that actually give you a dofollow link. It is basically impossible to do so without using a specialized program because 99.8% of blogs use the nofollow tag. I wish I could give you a link for it, but I’m not allowed to so, but ok, I’m sure you know how to use Google to find it yourself.

Once you have your list of blogs that suits your site you can start commenting, but never forget that there’s a human being behind that blog. High quality blogs do not fall out of the sky, they have been created by somebody who has put a lot of time and effort in it; respect that. Make sure you actually read the blog, do some research if needed before you start writing and take part in the conversation, don’t just drop some BS in there; you will only end up in spam filters and once that happens it is game over!

1 little practical advice I can give you is to write your comment first in a word document, so you can do a little spell check on it, but even more so; to keep a copy. Many times something might go wrong when you submit and if so you lose the comment and have to write it again.

Although in theory you should get links from as many different IP’s as possible, there are 2 good reasons to keep using the same blog for many comments;

1) There are just not that many really good blogs out there that give dofollow links

2) As long we’re talking about quality blogs, they most likely have hundreds, perhaps even thousands of pages, so to have 10-20 or even 50 links from the same blog is just fine.

In other words, as long you take the research serious and start with a good list of blogs, blog commenting is a very effective way to get quality links and even direct traffic. While reading those posts, assuming you did your homework and you’re writing them in blogs related to your site; it’s something you should do anyway to stay in touch with your market.

Michiel Van Kets writes articles for Luminous SEO Companyand offers link building services, like blog commenting service. His team of SEO-experts spends a lot of time on the blog research to find high quality blogs. Blog commenting is not something that can be simply put in a single category, as it is possible to get anchor text links from blog commenting, the really high quality blogs usually do not allow anchor texts. The very best dofollow blogs usually only accept .your name and the homepage as a link.

Publish this article: Introduction To Blog Commenting For Beginners

By: Hazar Umutay
Category: SEO

As already known, SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization” or “Search Engine Optimizer” which is nothing but the process of improving the visibility of a website or webpage in search engines via the “natural” or “unpaid” search results. The basic idea behind this concept is that your web page should appear frequently or first in the list when searched by users in common search engines. This enhances the visibility or website presence of your page in the cyberspace. In that case, the decision to hire an SEO is a very critical one because it is extremely capable of improving your site’s visibility but at the same time holds the risk of breaking down the reputation of your site by damaging it totally. That too Google SEO is not that easy to be learnt quickly about its operation and hence it’s better to get educated about these search engines before going into the process of hiring a guru or expert.

When decided to hire an SEO, it’s better to go to it earlier when there is a requirement of redesign or launching of new attributes into your site. In that way, he will be guiding you to build your site to be search-friendly as much as possible. Some main points to consider in this area are as follows.

• Always beware of firms which guarantee top ranking in SEO or any other sites. When they advertise stating that they employ special techniques to provide top ranking among websites or something like that, do not be deceived since there are no ways as such to gain priority in websites.

• You have to be very cautious when a company is reticent concealing all their works from you. Its mandatory to have an eye on what the company is doing on your site periodically.

• Confirm whether the company is doing their work correctly according to your stated payments. If they have been paid and promised to deliver you a top rank in search engines, but placed you in the advertising section, it’s an issue to be considered and dealt with henceforth.

• There are some common website abuses that a website owner is likely to encounter like “shadow “ domains, “doorway” pages, etc. Therefore, it’s good to not be deceived by any fake SEOs.

Considering all these points, there are some serious alarming signs that you have to be cautious about before hiring a SEO for your website. Whatever the case may be, you can feel free to walk away if the SEO owns shadow domains, operates through doorway pages, gets traffic from fake search engines or spyware and so on.
 

911 is a SEO company bringing mathematical results. They are located in Turkey, USA and UK.

Publish this article: A Few Guidelines To Consider Before Hiring a SEO Expert

By: David Andrew Smith
Category: SEO

I have written before about the benefit of articles and how they provide one way links back to your website and therefore improve the importance of your website and thus its ranking in the search engine results. The articles you write have the chance of spreading slowly around the web and ending up within ezines or on other websites or blogs. All of which provide links back to your website. So once you have over thirty articles out there the links can grow exponentially. Just consider what can happen if you have one hundred articles published? Two hundred articles?

The magic figure is said by some experts in this field to be 250 articles, it is then that this exponential growth in links and traffic to your site can be truly seen. I do not have personal experience of this yet as my own figure sits at 35 and this number is already having remarkable results as reported in a previous article. If you average 10 articles a month which is what my own aim is, then after 2 years you will have reached this magic figure of 250.

At the same time your website will have aged a further two years which will also benefit it and it will be viewed as one of the more important web sites. Patience is the key element in promoting your website. If you want your site to climb up through the rankings then you must have patience.

Do not be swayed into parting with money on the promise of instant high rankings. They can be achieved but will not be permanent and on Google in particular this is becoming increasingly more difficult to achieve as the algorithm becomes more complex. Why do you have to be patient? Google in particular requires a little patience. Google likes to see one way links pointing back to your site but will only count and use links after they have matured for some time.

So your articles may not appear as links for about 2 months and then as they mature further they will assume more and more importance in the eyes of Google. Consequently you may have 100 recorded backlinks but another site with only 50 backlinks is still ranked higher.

This is presumably due to your links being still young and not ‘fully matured. Once they do so you will leap ahead. With Yahoo the situation is similar but the time delay is less. You should start to see these links appearing after possibly 2 – 3 weeks. MSN is the fastest of the search engines to pick up and recognise these links which may very well happen within days. Consequently you should see very nearly immediate effects in your ranking on MSN and then a few weeks later with Yahoo finally followed after 2 – 3 months your rapid rise through Google. Have patience and keep the articles flowing as you will ultimately see the rewards for this endeavour and the most important thing is that your rise in the rankings will not be short lived.

About the author: David Andrew Smith is the owner of a contract cleaning company which operates its services across the whole of the UK. He has developed and continues to maintain and promote the companies website.

Publish this article: Improving Search Engine Rankings – Patience Is The Key

By: Craig Broadbent
Category: SEO

One of the most fundamental aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) is ensuring that the pages within your website are as accessible as possible to the search engines. It’s not only the homepage of a website that can be indexed, but also the internal pages within a site’s structure. The internal pages of a site often contain important content such as products, services or general information, and therefore can be uniquely optimised for related terms. As a result, easy access to these pages is vital. There are many do’s and don’ts involved in ensuring all of your pages can be found by search engines. However, it is important to first establish how the search engines find and index web pages.

Search engines use "robots" (also known as "bots" or "spiders") to find content on the web for inclusion in their index. A robot is a computer programme that can follow the hyperlinks on a web page, which is known as "crawling". When a robot finds a document it includes the contents within the search engine’s index, then follows the next links it can find and continues the process of crawling and indexing. With this in mind, it becomes apparent that the navigational structure of a website is important in getting as many pages as possible indexed. When considering the navigational structure of your site, the hierarchy of content should be considered. Search engines judge what they feel to be the most important pages of a site when considering rankings and a page’s position in the site structure can influence this.

The homepage is generally considered the most important page of a site – it is the top level document and usually attracts the most inbound links. From here, search engine robots can normally reach pages that are within three clicks of the homepage. Therefore, your most important pages should be one click away, the next important two clicks away and so forth.

The next thing to consider is how to link the pages together. Search engine robots can only follow generic HTML href links, meaning Flash links, JavaScript links, dropdown menus and submit buttons will all be inaccessible to robots. Links with query strings that have two or more parameters are also typically ignored, so be aware of this if you run a dynamically generated website.

The best links to use from an SEO perspective are generic HTML text links, as not only can they be followed by robots but the text contained in the anchor can also be used to describe the destination page – an optimisation plus point. Image links are also acceptable but the ability to describe the destination page is diminished, as the alt attribute is not given as much ranking weight as anchor text.

The most natural way to organise content on a website is to categorise it. Break down your products, services or information into related categories and then structure this so that the most important aspects are linked to from the homepage. If you have a vast amount of information for each category then again you will want to narrow your content down further. This could involve having articles on a similar topic, different types of product for sale, or content that can be broken down geographically.

Categorisation is natural optimisation – the further you break down your information the more content you can provide and the more niche key phrases there are that can be targeted. If you are still concerned that your important pages may not get indexed, then you can consider adding a sitemap to your website. A sitemap can be best described as an index page – it is a list of links to all of the pages within a site contained on one page. If you link to a sitemap from your homepage then it gives a robot easy access to all of the pages within your site. Just remember – robots typically can’t follow more than 100 links from one page, so if your site is larger than this you may want to consider spreading your sitemap across several pages.

There are many considerations to make when optimising your site for search engines, and making your pages accessible to search engine robots should be the first step of your optimisation process. Following the advice above will help you make your entire site accessible and aid you in gaining multiple rankings and extra traffic.

About the author: Craig Broadbent is Search Engine Optimisation Executive for UK-based internet marketing company, WebEvents Ltd. Clients of WebEvents benefit from a range of services designed to maximise ROI from internet marketing activities. To find out more, visit http://www.webeventseurope.com.

Publish this article: How To Ensure The Search Engines Find Your Website

By: Steve Szasz
Category: SEO

Every business owner I’ve met has been encouraged at some point to invest in a website; often convinced with hype that if their business didnt have a website then they might as well pack their bags and retire to the social security queue. Hype aside, this statement is basically true. Certainly, any business deemed suitable for online marketing will miss out on a flood of new business without the incorporation of a thorough online marketing strategy. In accepting this, you may choose to have a new website developed with all the bangs and whistles. But beware; unless your site can be found amongst the millions of web pages now shown on the Internet, your time and resources have been wasted. That’s why a Search Engine Optimiser is essential in maximising your chances of online success.

Search Engine Optimisation in it’s simplest form is the practice of fine tuning your website to achieve the highest possible position in the search results when a person searches for information using a search engine. In this article I will highlight the does and don’ts of selecting a credible and effective SEO company.

There are a number of points to be considered when making this decision. Including: Q. How can I judge if the SEO Company will produce what they say? A. In answering this question, be aware of the following when either talking to them or reading their sales pitches.

1. No reputable SEO company will submit your website to more than 30 odd major search engines and indexes. These major search engines and directories feed their search results to the million or so other so called "search engines". Submissions to a greater number is quite unnecessary and a certain indicator of a lack of professionalism.

2. Be wary of any claim that your site will be submitted to thousands of search engines. It is more than likely that these submissions will be made to what we call FFA websites. These are not search engines at all, but rather a kind of link exchange website. As a result, your email server may be flooded by huge amounts of unwanted email. In short, stay well away from any SEO making such claims.

3. Ask any prospective SEO to detail the successes they have had with their previous clients submissions. In being aware of these successes, your confidence in the ability of the SEO to maximise your website effectiveness will increase.

Q. How can I know if these website submissions are genuinely being done?

A. Unfortunately, in reality, you cant. Be certain to ask for a list of search engines and directories where submissions will or have been made.

Any reputable SEO company will supply you with a written monthly report highlighting the search engines to which your site has been submitted, the submission dates and progress of your website rankings. If, after 3 months, your website ranking hasnt improved then it is more than likely that optimisation isnt occurring and even doubtful whether the promised website submissions have even been made.

Q. How long before I can reasonably expect my search engine ranking to improve?

A. Usually, as a rule of thumb most of the major search engines will take up to 3 – 4 months before they will index your website. This is not always the case. Recently, I submitted my website to the Google Directory and indexation occurred the same day. The waiting time for indexation is unpredictable, but be prepared to allow 3-4 months.

Q. Will my SEO Company notify me when a search engine has added me to their index?

A. Yes. You should be notified within days of your website being indexed and at the very least at the end of each month.

Q. How will my SEO company optimise my website for submission to the search engines and Directories?

A. Basically, a good SEO will make your website as search engine friendly as possible.

This will involve changing the text and html code behind your website. Simply, when the search engine robot enters your website it finds it very easy to determine what your website is about. The correct keywords and meta tags will have been placed within your site, to ensure that the robot is able to collect and pass off information with speed and accuracy. This results in a much improved rank for your site; higher than would ever have been achieved without optimisation.

Your SEO will also optimise each page differently so that the robot will include more than one page in the search engine.

For example, if the robot comes to your homepage and it has been optimised and your primary message and keywords on that page were for new tyres then you would hope that when someone uses a keyword search for "new tyres", your website would be within the first 30 results. But on the other hand, another page of your website may be about wheel alignments. You would certainly hope that another searcher using a search phrase "wheel aligners" would get results pointing to that relevant wheel alignment page.

Your website success is completely determined by effective search engine optimisation . It is pointless investing time and resources developing a website without consideration to how your prospective clients will find you. It is no different to burning $50 notes. I hope you have found this short article useful and that I have helped you decide on a great SEO company. Of course, there are many more things to watch out for; but you are now aware of the main ones. Keep them in mind and you will get the results you are after.

About the author: Steve Szasz is an Australian renowned SEO and expert in the field of Marketing of Australian websites. Visit Steves website WebSeo+Plus for resources and tools to market your website successfully in Australia

Publish this article: Search Engine Submission – What To Look For When Selecting An Australian SEO Company

By: Kanaga Siva
Category: SEO

Various techniques are used by Specialists and Webmasters to Improve Search Engine Rank. This is because more than 80% of the people who want to know something go to the Search Engines to get what they want. Hence a Good Search Engine Rank is extremely important for the success of your Internet Marketing Business. Given below are some very Special Tips and Techniques that will help you in your efforts to Improve Search Engine Rank of your website.

1. FOCUS ON KEYWORDS. Choose Your Keywords: The first and most important step is to choose the right keywords for which you wish to rank well. You have to focus on this because all your efforts are going to be centered around this. While doing this for your home page it is important to adopt the same procedure and target different keywords for different pages of your site. This is because search engines match each query with the most relevant page and not the site.

Target The Right Keywords:

Optimizing your site for a popular keyword and securing a high page rank is not enough. You should optimize for the right keyword that is most relevant to your site otherwise your efforts will be in vain. The keywords that you choose should be specific. Since there is fierce competition for popular single word keywords, it is better to choose two or three word phrases that specifically describe your site content. Though you might obtain a good page rank with a very well optimized site and it appears high in the results, if no one searches for them in the search engines you are not going to enjoy the benefits of a high PR. so choose one that is reasonably popular and ones that people actually type.

2. INTEGRATE KEYWORDS. Once the right keywords relevant to your site are chosen, you should now integrate these keywords into your site, placing very special attention to places where Search Engines look.

Website URL: It is very important that you have at least one of the important keywords in the URL.This will help the search engine to understand what your site is all about. Page Title: To improve page rank the page title is another important place to integrate your keywords. Since this too gives an indication to the search engine useful information about your site. Though most sites use the same title for all the pages, it is better to have different titles with specific keywords integrated into it, reflecting the content in that particular page.

Page Content: It is a well known fact that the page content or text is most important to search engines. So to improve page rank you should focus all your attention to ensure that the targeted keywords are well represented in your content. Unless these keywords appear in the text your chances of obtaining a good page rank will be remote. In addition to having your keywords in the text of the page three very important criteria should also be adhered to, which is very often overlooked by most webmasters.

a. Use keywords frequently but do not stuff your page with keywords. Search Engines do not approve keyword stuffing.

b. Place your keywords close to each other. This helps the the search engines.

c. Place the keywords near the top of your page in the page content.

3. OBTAIN LINKS FROM OTHER SITES. To improve search engine rank another important thing you should do is to get other sites to link to you, because the number of links, linking to your site is a measure of popularity. Most search engines consider link popularity as the most important factor in deciding the relevance of a site. It becomes obvious that you should put in a lot of effort to get as many sites as possible to link to you. If it is a new site get a link from a website that has already been listed in search engines.

Search Engines look at not only the number of sites that link to you but also the quality of the sites that link to you. In other words a link from a popular and relevenant P7 site is much better than several links from smaller sites. Hence quality is considered more important than quantity. A judicious mix of quality and quantity will help improve search engine rank.

4. META TAGS: It is an embedded HTML tag that contains descriptive information, keywords and other information about a web page and does not appear when the web page is displayed in a browser. There was a time when search engines relied on Meta tags to assess the sites relevance and rank them. Most Search Engines no longer rely on meta tags since they have developed new systems for this purpose. Nevertheless it is advisable to have them to improve search engine rank.

5. ALT TAGS: Another important aspect that is often overlooked is the importance of ALT tags. Search Engines don’t index images. They can’t read them; so to fix this problem there are ALT tags which are descriptions of images that are recognized by search engines. So to get the search engines to recognize the images on your site, ALT tags with keywords can be used which will in turn help you to improve your rank in search engines.

Finally a word of advice, do not try to trick the search engines by using unaccecptable techniques becuse it will not pay in the long run and you could get penalised. By following these methods you will succeed in your attempt to improve search engine rank yourself and be happy and proud of your achievement. Advice from a Specialist will certainly be of help if your intention is to reach the top.

About the author: Copyright © 2005 Kanaga Siva. Kanaga Siva has a wealth of experience in Marketing and Home Based Business. Visit his website Free Home Based Business for Articles, Resources and Ideas to start a Home Based Business and enroll for his Free Newsletter.

Publish this article: Top Tips And Techniques To Improve Search Engine Rank Of Your Website.

By: David Leonhardt
Category: SEO

So you’ve translated your website into German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, French, Arabic, Portuguese and Chinese. Now what?

Now you have to draw traffic to the newly translated sites. There are many ways to draw traffic, but the search engines are just as important in German or Spanish as they are in English.

Surprisingly, SEO in Spanish, French, English, German…or any Roman alphabet language is not that different. In this article, we will be dealing only with Roman alphabet languages.

The main thing is to be able to move around in the language…and if you are not fluent, make sure a translator cleans up any text edits without undoing the changes key to your multilingual SEO efforts.

Let’s assume the original site is in English, the translation into French, for example, is already complete and you have a list of English search terms (keywords).

The first step is to identify equivalent French search terms. This might not give you the same number of search terms. For instance, if you start with the 10 search terms around the word "socks" (buy socks, buy socks online, glow-in-the-dark socks, etc.), you will most likely end up with twice as many search terms in French, as there are two common words for socks in French ("bas" and "chaussettes"). This might mean that you need to create additional landing pages for French search engine surfers.

Note: be wary of using official translations for keyword research. Your translator probably used the very best vocabulary and grammar possible, including words and conjugations that your target market might never even have heard of, let alone be searching for.

You can get ideas through free translation services – which absolutely butcher the language, so don’t use them for translation, please! – that can give you some quick ideas to work with. Two such services I use for just such a purpose are FreeTranslation.com and FreeTranslation.Paralink.com.

The next step, of course, is to find out which of the search terms are worth pursuing. Of course, you could try all of them, since it will take almost no effort to get top rankings for little searched French or Spanish terms. But you might also miss out on some related terms that are well-searched. Two pay-per-click search engines that offer search suggestion tools in a variety of languages are Overture and Miva (formerly Espotting).

The third step is to group the search terms together into natural groupings and assign each group to a page on the website, just as one would do in English, so that the terms that complement each other are grouped onto the same web page.

You see, it’s really not that different from English, but you do have to be able to move through the other language. Please note: fluency is not required, but being able to understand what you read and come up with related search terms is required.

In part 2, we will look at the on-page optimization.

David Leonhardt is a multilingual SEO consultant who offers Spanish language SEO services. Pick up a copy of his SEO strategies e-book.

Publish this article: Multilingual SEO for world markets Part 1

By: David Leonhardt
Category: SEO

In part 1, we looked at keyword research in foreign languages, such as German, French, Spanish and Italian. In part 2, we will look at the on-page optimization…or what to do with that keyword research.

Actually, the on-page optimization is easy. Just place your search terms in all the right places. Of course, it is not quite that simple.

For instance, German nouns like to merge into incredible conglomerates. An example of where I ran into this was at this Netzwerk überwachung website. Two major search terms were Netzwerküberwachung and Netzwerk überwachung. The first, conglomerate word is actually correct, but people search in funny ways, and the search engines don’t generally recognize partial words. In English, a reference to "website monitoring service" would count as a reference for the search term "website monitoring". But the German equivalent, Überwachungsservice für Webseiten, would read literally in English as "monitoringservice for websites".

In other words, you might have to make the translator dance some fancy language steps to deliver a readable message that does not interfere with your search terms.

Multilingual search engine optimization also brings the question of accents. Use them. One well-respected SEO questioned the use of accents when it turned out that more people searched for Montreal than Montréal. Don’t you believe it for a second. There simply were more English people searching without the accent, so leave the accents off your English site but keep them on your French, German, Italian or other sites.

There is one exception to the accents rule: if your market is very, um, shall we say "downscale". I think you know what I mean. There is a certain market in English that refuses to capitalize words or use punctuation. The equivalent market in German is unlikely to use an umlaut – you might have to optimize both with and without the accent.

What about file names. Many companies keep the same filenames when they create a translated site. So http://www.rgb.com/en/Products/AudioVisual.asp becomes http://www.rgb.com/de/Products/AudioVisual.asp , a mouthful in any language, but of no SEO help in the German version. On the other hand, keeping the same file name helps the webmaster keep track of what all these otherwise "unintelligible" filenames are all about, without resorting to a wall covered in file name translation tables. This is not a simple decision to make.

One question that often comes up is where to house the translated site on a separate site, in a sub-domain or in a directory on the English site.

The general consensus is that it is preferable to give it its own domain with the appropriate country extension…which is easy for German or Italian, but which country do you choose for Spanish? Spain? Mexico? Argentina? The USA? And have you ever tried to apply for a .fr domain?

Second best is a sub-domain, which at least carries a semblance of being a separate site and allows some directories to consider it a home page for listing purposes (and you want those directory links).

Which brings me to my final point. Don’t forget to build the links that are so important to your optimization. Good quality links. Relevant links, both in terms of topics and in terms of the search terms in the language of the site. There are fewer avenues to build links in French or Dutch than in English. Fortunately, you will need fewer links to get good French or Dutch search engine rankings.

Thinking about expanding your market into Europe, Latin America or the rest of Canada? Get your site translated and get it optimized for the multilingual search engine listings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Leonhardt is a multilingual SEO consultant who offers German language SEO services. Pick up a copy of his SEO tips book.

Publish this article: Multilingual SEO for world markets Part 2