International SEO Question

[Jeffwend]

One of our clients wants their website to show up higher in Western Europe versions of Google. They are also looking for SEO help in certain African countries where they have had a lot of business over the last year.

Any advice on this subject? They do not want to build new websites with URL's and hosting done in those nations.

I feel like links from websites hosted in those specific regions would help. We are debating doing some foreign SEO outsourcing too.

any advice at all would be appreciated.

[morestar]

One of our clients wants their website to show up higher in Western Europe versions of Google. They are also looking for SEO help in certain African countries where they have had a lot of business over the last year.

Any advice on this subject? They do not want to build new websites with URL's and hosting done in those nations.

I feel like links from websites hosted in those specific regions would help. We are debating doing some foreign SEO outsourcing too.

any advice at all would be appreciated.

I need the website before I can make any comments.

You can disguise it if you like, like w w w.domain[insert unrelated text]name.com, that is if you don't want the domain here...I'd like to see the domain just as an overview...

[Jeffwend]

I sent you a DM. Keep in mind that we have done no seo at all yet for this website as you will be able to tell.

[ozsubasi]

Providing you have a generic (i.e. not country specific) TLD then you could have individual pages within your existing site tailored for specific countries and you can set individual geo targets for each page within Google webmaster tools. If however you had a number of pages for each country you could set up sub-domains.

[qdb]

If you want to target a specific Google locale you can set it up using Google webmaster tools, which will not help you too much but its a good start.
What will help you is backlinks from domains names of that specific country, for example links from .fr website will improve your ranking in google.fr

[Alok Saharia]

If you want to target a specific Google locale you can set it up using Google webmaster tools, which will not help you too much but its a good start.
What will help you is backlinks from domains names of that specific country, for example links from .fr website will improve your ranking in google.fr

A good strategy to promote a website in a particular locality. Also, try some other local search engines, websites and ads listing websites. But before it as mentioned in other posts you might have to set different pages for different localities.

[PhilipDunn]

I know little about this, except that I am currently marketing a site in other countries. I have the site separated according to the language in folders, like /it/, /es/, etc. Foreign language search engines have been ranking the pages well..

[claybutler]

There's no way around it. If you only want to have only one website, but you want to target such a wide arry of geographical locations, you'll need a really great site architecture that can support and channel these keyword requirements and then back that up with lots of great unique content reinforcing your keywords.

World of Widgets
> European Widgets
>> Widgets from Spain
>> Widgets from France
> African Widgets
>> Widgets from South Africa
>> Widgets from Uganda

[Jeffwend]

Thanks for the advice so far guys.

@qdp good advice and we will look into that when we get access to their webmaster tools

@newoptimizer - most of the target countries are native English speaking, but not all so that is good advice

@Clay - we were hoping to not have to do that but you might be right. Possibly we could have it in a site that is not in the main menu but is listed in the xml sitemap

If you want to look at the site here is the address .banner[beta]flexhard[alpha]ware dot com

Wehave not yet started doing any seo on it yet but we have had good success with one of the companies other websites. I know that we will have to revise the content and the title tags, but what I'm not sure about is the best way to build links in some of these foreign countries.

[claybutler]

@Clay - we were hoping to not have to do that but you might be right. Possibly we could have it in a site that is not in the main menu but is listed in the xml sitemap
.

A site map won't do it. You need link juice and the only way to do that (except for off site links) it through your site architecture. Every link on every page is a keyword vote. So if you have a 100 pages on your site and your global navigation has "Widgets from Spain" on it, that's 100 votes for that page for the key phrase "Widgets from Spain".

It really works. A sitemap link is not going to cut it. I manipulate my rank all the time just by improving architecture and internal contextual linking.