International SEO
-
We have a client who is looking to expand to other countries, particularly South America. What is my best route forward for SEO on a multi national site?
-
Hi Dave,
There is a wealth of information out there about internationalisation but I'll cover some of the main points here.
The first thing to think about is the TLD of the site, e.g. .com, etc. If they are currently running on a TLD that belongs to a designated country, they will need to move to a generic TLD. In other words, you can't use site.ca to target Mexico. You will need to move to site.com, .org, .net, or similar.
You can use subdomains or subfolders on the parent site to target different countries. A good URL to target Mexico would be site.com/mx. If you have English language content from Mexico as well as Spanish, you could use site.com/mx-es/ and site.com/mx-en/. No matter how many versions of the site you create for different markets, you will need to use the rel="alternative" tag (also sometimes referred to has the "href lang tag"). This will allow you to create site.com/co for Colombia, site.com/nc for Nicaragua, site.com/mx for Mexico and site.com/ar for Argentina without being penalised for having duplicate Spanish content on different parts of the same website. If you also have the exact same content on the site in other languages, this tag allows you to show which versions are in English and are meant for the US, which versions are in English and are meant for Canada, which versions are in English and meant for the UK, etc. as well.
They can go down the route of registering domains in the countries they want to target, like site.com.mx, site.com.ar and site.com.br, but this usually requires a higher level of link development to push authority at all of these sites. For truly local content, the local domains could be best, but for many queries, .com sites rank just fine in South America.
Check out these three Moz resources for international SEO as well:
http://moz.com/blog/5-dos-and-donts-of-international-seo
http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist
http://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How Do SSL Certificates Affect On SEO?
Does really a SSL certificate affect on SEO? How? Why? According to my hosting provider (ganje.host), "https" improves SEO! As I know, It decreases speed. So how does it improve SEO when my speed is slower than before?
On-Page Optimization | | MirzaeeMustafa0 -
Best On page SEO guides needed.
I know my question looks so basic but let me explain what I want. I want advanced on-page SEO guides, should include something new exce[t the below listed things: title, description keyword in article content length video images with alt tag headings external authority links internal links please share something new....
On-Page Optimization | | hammadrafique0 -
Do parameters in a URL make a difference from an SEO point of view
We us a number of different parameters in a number of our URLs to track how the user has navigated to the page. So for example we will have a page www.example.com/product/?banner to show that the user has navigated to the page from the banner as opposed to www.example.com/product/?footer to show that the user has navigated to the page from the footer. Do search engines treat these pages as the same page or different pages? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | cbarron0 -
A good SEO praxis?
Hi all, having a worpress site with 10 DIFFERENT pages (each with its own different content) and consequently 10 DIFFERENT keywords to optimize......Can somehow Google penalize me for having such a number of different keyowrds? I guess sometimes there no way to avoid it. It depends on the content of each page. You'll need a keyword to optimize them (if you consider they are relevant enough). Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Does Channeladvisor really assist in SEO?
I'm getting emails from Channeladvisor recommending I join, thereby taking advantage of a change to Google Shopping. It is starting in Australia from today (13Feb13). Is it an upgraded version of Google Adwords, or another form of a Commerce Merchant (obviously with multiple channels,e.g. Ebay, Amazon etc)? With Adwords, I found it too expensive for the type of product we sell (printer cartridges). But the real question is, DO MY RANKINGS DROP FROM NOT USING CHANNEL ADVISOR?
On-Page Optimization | | ABCPS0 -
Google Authorship for SEO Content Writers
I am interested to know the best way to go about about Google authorship on blog articles written for a client. For example is it a bad idea for an SEO content writer to publish articles under their own identity, what are the potential footprint downsides to this?
On-Page Optimization | | Clicksjim1 -
Are outlinks an essential element for onsite SEO?
I recently read the blog post by Steve Webb about performing a SEO Audit (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit). In the article he mentions that it's important to have outlinks to high-quality websites. So my questions is if this is an essential element of onsite SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | Nick_Johansson0 -
Good Internal Site Structure Idea?
Hello SEOMoz, After reading a bunch of your Site Structure articles, I've decided to make ours more flat. There are numerous pages on our site which are linked to directly from our homepage, wasting mysterious amounts of Link Juice every day. I want to remove most of these links so that the Fewer, and now more heavily weighted, Homepage Links will be more powerful... but I am worried that the pages which I am knocking down to the 3rd tier level already have high rank and are distributing this Juice to other pages. The problem is that 3 of these 9 pages are great for assisting our sales team, so I cannot take those 2 links off of the homepage...so I will be forced to Nofollow them instead. I am worried this is cutting down the number of pages on the site, also cutting out content which was previously indexed. Is this whole thing a good idea at all? And should I just leave those 2 pages alone because I can't remove the link? I'm thinking maybe I should rel=canonical it back to the homepage? I am ultimately trying to rank the homepage for the keyword "POS Software" and this is my on-site strategy for it. Maybe adding a link from those 2 pages that say "POS Software" back to the homepage is the best bet in this scenario? I am trying to learn the absolute best thing to do instead of guessing. Thanks! Derek
On-Page Optimization | | DerekM880