Hi Greg

Yes, you are right and we actually put this forward to the client, there was actually more benefits to doing it this as we saw the situation. If nothing more than the fact its all under the one "domain"

But after we established with the client that we would need two sites, be it two separate domains or using sub-domains, the client actually insisted that they wanted the two domains option.

We found it difficult to put a concrete case in front the of the customer to justify going down the sub-domain route considering they were so adamant to use two separate domains.

Customer in king, they pay the bills, we rolled with them on the two domains ...

I would be interested though how the sub-domain option would have worked to be fair, we had planned to use the main domain as more of an information portal , utilize that for targeting their key-phrases, it would have left us a lot more room to be more versatile with actual content as with all e-Commerce stores.

Its defiantly the more conventional approach people take ... but their is nothing conventional with this client

John

Well on the contrary, I am not so sure the term passe comes to mind ... Different situations call for different approaches, you got to be versatile in this game, there is no fire sure remedy for each and every client or project.

We have an e-Commerce client who want to target both the  UK and Irish markets with immediate effect, and after a lot of consideration ,and due to their nature of business, we and they decided to go with two e-Commerce stores to two separate domains (.ie & .co.uk).

In all senses of purpose, they are the same websites, well selling the exact same products. Same site structure, same CSS, same JS etc etc.

The approach we took was to vary the product descriptions, have different URLS for the same product on both sites, have different image names and alt tags on both sites ... create different topics about the product categories on both websites, and lastly for the onsite optimisation ,we created two separate blogs on both websites with totally unique content (no cross over for the blogs).

Off page ,we started two separate social campaigns along with two separate online marketing campaigns supported by two separate ad words campaigns.

Granted there was more work involved than creating one website and target two countries, but with regards to budget for the client, it was relatively similar doing it the way we did it.

So the results ,well its rare it happens but we where pretty happy with the results so far 3 months down the line, both sites are fully indexed and ranking  well in the SERP for their respective countries ...

The major key-terms we need both to rank for last week broke into the top 50 in the UK and is 11 in Ireland (really high competitive term), but this is to be expected regardless of how we ran the campaign, but the LTK and less competitive terms are already ranking first page already ...

We have been totally able to optimize each website for its respective country, from link building through to dynamic content

So does it work, yes, is it worth it ,well that depends on your business and clients situation, is it more expensive, well that depends on how your look at your budget, or your clients.

But one thing I can say for sure, would we have achieved the success we have for the client so far had we one website targeting two separate counties, not on your Nelly would we have, no way by 3 months into the campaign.

Just thought  bit of perspective from someone going through the situation live might help

Regards

John

Firstly the rich snippets do not help your website rank better !!! Although they should help immensely  with CTR assuming you are using them correctly and effectively. A rich snippet is a way of informing people searching for relevant content some extra details ... more than say Google will display within the SERP, so if you have this as detailed as possible, people are more inclined to click through to your page / video

So, you will still need to work on getting the video ranked within the SERP

Have you submitted a video sitemap, if not I would advise you to do that, that will help with Google finding your video for a start. If not I would also advise your create relevant content within the page in your website you display your video, this will help once again with the ranking of the Video or that page that contains it.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472&topic=10079&ctx=topic

As for the markup for the actual video, looks fine from here

Hope that helps

John

To answer your question, a span tag within a H1 tag will not have any negative effect, its quite normal to use markup to add visualize appearance, and a span tag is not  "semantic" markup.

Once you are not splitting up the word, as is using

Nike

, I have read that the robots would read that as N "space" ike ... hence not the word nike

BTW, thats a very crude and unsemanctic way to style that phrase, why the div within the H1 tag

I would use a below, without having the benefit of seeing your website layout of course

Big Shoes for Big Guys

Nike Shoes

Then add your markup and styling within the the classes

If you need anymore help with the styling, give me a shout

Regards

John

Hehe, great bio ....

Yes, Goggle will see these as duplicate content, and all your sites be effected by this. Parked domains are a big no no.

I would suggest you set up redirect for all the othe r7 domains to the main domain you want to use, Google advises this and well it makes perfect sense also.

You can actually do this from c-Panel as per your screen shot, or you could use your .htaccess to do this

Regards

John

If you mean the meta title, then I wouldn't think so, its not really repetitive, rather uniformity.

Myself, I would rather add a more specific keyword to the beginning of a page title, as it helps with CTR and ranking. I always feel these generic page titles does nothing bit hinder ranking for people who use them.

For example, to me

Shoes by Armain at Shoes World ,shop today

Is better than

Shop Shoes | Armani

Obviously you could optimize the text better yourself, but hopefully you get my drift

Regards

John

The store we are currently working on are actually two seperate sites ... .co.uk and .ie , actually they aren't even on the same server , I am of the believe if you are trying to rank in the .co.uk, use a server based in the UK and vice verse (I must add this is more opinion that substantiated evidence )

Lots of stores do though use subdomains, actually I would suggest that this is more  common than the approach we are talking about, for client reasons we actually created two separate domains.

We have though found it a lot easier targeting two local search results using two separate domains than we have in the past using subdomains ...

If you do go down the root of using www.domain.com/fr, you will in theory, have one website trying to target two different languages, and to be honest, I have never ever worked in that situation ,so hopefully someone with experience there can offer you some advise, thankfully we have only ever worked with English.

3 months ago I would have probably thought going with the subdomin would be the best fit, but from our recent experiences of creating two separate domains of late, I might think that would be a better fit (but once again ,its merely an opinion, there may not be no right of wrong answer here)

Hopefully someone who has worked with two international languages might advise, I mean without stating the obvious, anyone worth their salt in coding can create a  script that will translate your current website into a number of languages, Google has one built in as you probably know.

But the problem there might be if you have optimised your website already to rank within google.es, and then have to adjust your website to target google.fr

I appreciate a lot of the advise here is subjective, buit its hard to offer definitive advice when I have not actually been in your position, or not sue how you are set up at the moment, but at worse it will get your brain working

Regards

John

Content is always an issue when you come to online stores in particular ... We have not worked with Alcohol related stores, but on numerous occasions with Jewellery stores ... and have had the same issues with content being firstly:

Minimal, descriptions of products contain little or no information.

Repetitive - One product can be pretty much the same as the other product.

The way we have tried to address this and been relatively successful, is by not actually trying to rank each and every product, but rather the product category,our client did not necessarily want to rank for a specific piece, rather though the term "wedding Jewellery", or "Pearl Pendant" ...

We then obviously created a section in each website, with proper structure and informal information about each product category, and from there linked to the product page or indeed each product.

I assume you could take the same approach .... by creating product informal pages ,talking about how the gin was distilled etc etc, I am a great believer it doesn't matter how you rank the clients term, its getting the person looking for the product to the clients website, and from there having a well structured navigation path for them to easily and accessibly get to the product to purchase them.

So yes, I would use blogs, I would use any tool available to you to enhance e-Commerce stores cause they are notoriously lacking good content for you to work with.

I would also suggest you use rich snippets ....

I assume you are going to translate the website (as French folk speak French ,not Spanish  ,is it a new website you are doing for the French market ,is your current website set up to target Google locally ...

We are currently working with a client who has two stores, almost identical in content, that targets specifically the Irish and UK markets .. This was a huge problem initially for us, but we got around it by structuring the pages differently ,trying to make unique content for each almost identical page. I got advise of someone on here to make sure the URL for each page was different, which is helping a lot, using rel can ....

Kind of easier to offer specific advise if we know if you plan to use the same website to target France, or is it a new website

Oh, as for using social., Every other drink manufacturer in the world use all social engines, there may be guidelines you have to adhere to ....But you can use it ... mind ya, I am a rugby fan ,and I know from rugby France is very strict on alcohol advertising, marketing

Hope that helps a little and good luck

Regards

John

I would also have a look at Rich Snippets, that way the one you intend to trying to rank can be displayed in the results as you would like

We have used them for lots of videos for clients and got great success optimisting the results we are looking for

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=162163&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

Yes, Goggle will see these as duplicate content, and all your sites be effected by this. Parked domains are a big no no.

I would suggest you set up redirect for all the othe r7 domains to the main domain you want to use, Google advises this and well it makes perfect sense also.

You can actually do this from c-Panel as per your screen shot, or you could use your .htaccess to do this

Regards

John

I would also have a look at Rich Snippets, that way the one you intend to trying to rank can be displayed in the results as you would like

We have used them for lots of videos for clients and got great success optimisting the results we are looking for

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=162163&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

Well on the contrary, I am not so sure the term passe comes to mind ... Different situations call for different approaches, you got to be versatile in this game, there is no fire sure remedy for each and every client or project.

We have an e-Commerce client who want to target both the  UK and Irish markets with immediate effect, and after a lot of consideration ,and due to their nature of business, we and they decided to go with two e-Commerce stores to two separate domains (.ie & .co.uk).

In all senses of purpose, they are the same websites, well selling the exact same products. Same site structure, same CSS, same JS etc etc.

The approach we took was to vary the product descriptions, have different URLS for the same product on both sites, have different image names and alt tags on both sites ... create different topics about the product categories on both websites, and lastly for the onsite optimisation ,we created two separate blogs on both websites with totally unique content (no cross over for the blogs).

Off page ,we started two separate social campaigns along with two separate online marketing campaigns supported by two separate ad words campaigns.

Granted there was more work involved than creating one website and target two countries, but with regards to budget for the client, it was relatively similar doing it the way we did it.

So the results ,well its rare it happens but we where pretty happy with the results so far 3 months down the line, both sites are fully indexed and ranking  well in the SERP for their respective countries ...

The major key-terms we need both to rank for last week broke into the top 50 in the UK and is 11 in Ireland (really high competitive term), but this is to be expected regardless of how we ran the campaign, but the LTK and less competitive terms are already ranking first page already ...

We have been totally able to optimize each website for its respective country, from link building through to dynamic content

So does it work, yes, is it worth it ,well that depends on your business and clients situation, is it more expensive, well that depends on how your look at your budget, or your clients.

But one thing I can say for sure, would we have achieved the success we have for the client so far had we one website targeting two separate counties, not on your Nelly would we have, no way by 3 months into the campaign.

Just thought  bit of perspective from someone going through the situation live might help

Regards

John

To answer your question, a span tag within a H1 tag will not have any negative effect, its quite normal to use markup to add visualize appearance, and a span tag is not  "semantic" markup.

Once you are not splitting up the word, as is using

Nike

, I have read that the robots would read that as N "space" ike ... hence not the word nike

BTW, thats a very crude and unsemanctic way to style that phrase, why the div within the H1 tag

I would use a below, without having the benefit of seeing your website layout of course

Big Shoes for Big Guys

Nike Shoes

Then add your markup and styling within the the classes

If you need anymore help with the styling, give me a shout

Regards

John

Hi Greg

Yes, you are right and we actually put this forward to the client, there was actually more benefits to doing it this as we saw the situation. If nothing more than the fact its all under the one "domain"

But after we established with the client that we would need two sites, be it two separate domains or using sub-domains, the client actually insisted that they wanted the two domains option.

We found it difficult to put a concrete case in front the of the customer to justify going down the sub-domain route considering they were so adamant to use two separate domains.

Customer in king, they pay the bills, we rolled with them on the two domains ...

I would be interested though how the sub-domain option would have worked to be fair, we had planned to use the main domain as more of an information portal , utilize that for targeting their key-phrases, it would have left us a lot more room to be more versatile with actual content as with all e-Commerce stores.

Its defiantly the more conventional approach people take ... but their is nothing conventional with this client

John

Firstly the rich snippets do not help your website rank better !!! Although they should help immensely  with CTR assuming you are using them correctly and effectively. A rich snippet is a way of informing people searching for relevant content some extra details ... more than say Google will display within the SERP, so if you have this as detailed as possible, people are more inclined to click through to your page / video

So, you will still need to work on getting the video ranked within the SERP

Have you submitted a video sitemap, if not I would advise you to do that, that will help with Google finding your video for a start. If not I would also advise your create relevant content within the page in your website you display your video, this will help once again with the ranking of the Video or that page that contains it.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472&topic=10079&ctx=topic

As for the markup for the actual video, looks fine from here

Hope that helps

John

Content is always an issue when you come to online stores in particular ... We have not worked with Alcohol related stores, but on numerous occasions with Jewellery stores ... and have had the same issues with content being firstly:

Minimal, descriptions of products contain little or no information.

Repetitive - One product can be pretty much the same as the other product.

The way we have tried to address this and been relatively successful, is by not actually trying to rank each and every product, but rather the product category,our client did not necessarily want to rank for a specific piece, rather though the term "wedding Jewellery", or "Pearl Pendant" ...

We then obviously created a section in each website, with proper structure and informal information about each product category, and from there linked to the product page or indeed each product.

I assume you could take the same approach .... by creating product informal pages ,talking about how the gin was distilled etc etc, I am a great believer it doesn't matter how you rank the clients term, its getting the person looking for the product to the clients website, and from there having a well structured navigation path for them to easily and accessibly get to the product to purchase them.

So yes, I would use blogs, I would use any tool available to you to enhance e-Commerce stores cause they are notoriously lacking good content for you to work with.

I would also suggest you use rich snippets ....

I assume you are going to translate the website (as French folk speak French ,not Spanish  ,is it a new website you are doing for the French market ,is your current website set up to target Google locally ...

We are currently working with a client who has two stores, almost identical in content, that targets specifically the Irish and UK markets .. This was a huge problem initially for us, but we got around it by structuring the pages differently ,trying to make unique content for each almost identical page. I got advise of someone on here to make sure the URL for each page was different, which is helping a lot, using rel can ....

Kind of easier to offer specific advise if we know if you plan to use the same website to target France, or is it a new website

Oh, as for using social., Every other drink manufacturer in the world use all social engines, there may be guidelines you have to adhere to ....But you can use it ... mind ya, I am a rugby fan ,and I know from rugby France is very strict on alcohol advertising, marketing

Hope that helps a little and good luck

Regards

John

The store we are currently working on are actually two seperate sites ... .co.uk and .ie , actually they aren't even on the same server , I am of the believe if you are trying to rank in the .co.uk, use a server based in the UK and vice verse (I must add this is more opinion that substantiated evidence )

Lots of stores do though use subdomains, actually I would suggest that this is more  common than the approach we are talking about, for client reasons we actually created two separate domains.

We have though found it a lot easier targeting two local search results using two separate domains than we have in the past using subdomains ...

If you do go down the root of using www.domain.com/fr, you will in theory, have one website trying to target two different languages, and to be honest, I have never ever worked in that situation ,so hopefully someone with experience there can offer you some advise, thankfully we have only ever worked with English.

3 months ago I would have probably thought going with the subdomin would be the best fit, but from our recent experiences of creating two separate domains of late, I might think that would be a better fit (but once again ,its merely an opinion, there may not be no right of wrong answer here)

Hopefully someone who has worked with two international languages might advise, I mean without stating the obvious, anyone worth their salt in coding can create a  script that will translate your current website into a number of languages, Google has one built in as you probably know.

But the problem there might be if you have optimised your website already to rank within google.es, and then have to adjust your website to target google.fr

I appreciate a lot of the advise here is subjective, buit its hard to offer definitive advice when I have not actually been in your position, or not sue how you are set up at the moment, but at worse it will get your brain working

Regards

John

If you mean the meta title, then I wouldn't think so, its not really repetitive, rather uniformity.

Myself, I would rather add a more specific keyword to the beginning of a page title, as it helps with CTR and ranking. I always feel these generic page titles does nothing bit hinder ranking for people who use them.

For example, to me

Shoes by Armain at Shoes World ,shop today

Is better than

Shop Shoes | Armani

Obviously you could optimize the text better yourself, but hopefully you get my drift

Regards

John