Question: I want to submit my site to the international (non-U.S. search engines). How should I do this?

Shari says: I understand the desire to have visibility in all of the major search engines in the world.

After all, it is called the “World Wide Web,” and you want everyone in the world to easily find your site in all of the search engines.

When you submit your site to the U.S.-based search engines, your site is automatically submitted to English-speaking, country-specific, spider-based search engines. For example, U.S.-based sites show up in regional search engine results from Australia, United Kingdom, and Canada.

Even though all of the spider-based search engines work the same way (index text, follow links, measure popularity), targeting a non-U.S. audience is not as simple as it might seem.

If you feel that your target audience extends to non-English speaking countries, you will need to modify your web site, or create a new one, to meet the needs of that target audience.

Here are the steps I use to determine whether or not a site should target non-U.S. search engines.

Motivation and Budget

One of the first questions I ask a client is, “Why do you feel that your site should be in the non-U.S. search engines?”

If you honestly believe that you have a target audience from a specific foreign country, using Germany as an example, I look for specific reasons why that country should be targeted. Here are some of the questions that I typically ask:

• Do you have any German or German-speaking clients on your current client list?
• Have you looked at your site statistics software and determined that a considerable percentage of your site visitors are from Germany?
• Do you have an office location in Germany? If not, do you plan to have one?
• Do you have German-speaking customer service agents to answer customer inquiries? Do you have a phone number that goes directly to these customer service agents?
• Does your industry naturally encourage German-speaking visitors to come to your site? The travel industry is an example of an industry that might encourage German-speaking visitors.
• Are you prepared to create an entirely new web site, or subdomain, tailored specifically for German-speaking visitors?
• How many pages do you wish to have on the new German-language site? I generally look for an answer of at least 20 pages, because few professional, corporate sites contain less than 20 pages of high-quality information.

If I get well-researched answers to these questions, then I know a client is prepared to create an optimized site for German-speaking visitors.

Quite often, the motivation to be listed in the non-U.S. search engines is purely to increase search engine visibility. That is the WRONG reason to submit to the non-U.S. search engines. Most search engines consider it spam if you submit pages purely to boost search engine positions. All web pages must be designed and written primarily for human visitors.

Domain Names

Having a domain name for a specific country is a key indicator that your web site belongs in the non-U.S. search engines. So if your U.S. domain name is TranquiliTeasOrganic.com, the German site should have the domain name TranquiliTeasOrganic.de.

You don’t have to purchase an additional domain name. You can have a subdirectory (Companyname.com/deutsch) or subdomain (deutsch.companyname.com) on your web site. Just be sure that each subdirectory or subdomain contains unique and substantial content written in the appropriate language.

Foreign Languages in U.S. Sites

What if you don’t have a web site that targets a foreign country, specifically, but targets a non-English language? For example, what if you want to target Spanish-speaking people in the U.S.?

We donate our time to a non-profit women’s shelter, and they have both English- and Spanish-language brochures and flyers at the shelter. They have volunteers and staff who speak fluent Spanish.

Clearly, they have a need to have both English and Spanish versions of their web site.

To create a set of optimized pages in the Spanish language, we would recommended creating a subdirectory (least expensive) of key pages:

• Home page
• Domestic Violence Shelter Services
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Contact Us Form
• Safety Tips
• Site Map

We would optimize the site in the same way we would optimize an English-language site. We place far more emphasis on the visible body text and the title tags than anything else. We cross-link related pages.

Furthermore, we make sure that the search engines are able to find both the Spanish-language pages and the English-language pages by cross-linking the two site maps.

Whether you choose to use subdirectories, subdomains, or new sites, always be sure that your site maps are linked to each other.

Submission

Follow the same submission process to U.S. search engines as I do to non-U.S. search engines. I always begin with directory submission because acceptance into a quality directory is the quickest and easiest way to gain popularity.

Yahoo, LookSmart, and Open Directory all have regional sections of their web sites. These are 3 good places to start.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch has an excellent set of links to non-U.S. search engines and directories available at:

http://searchenginewatch.com/links/country.html

If you plan on targeting non-U.S. search engines, be prepared to regularly analyze, monitor, and update your pages based on your target audience.

Shari Thurow is Marketing Director at Grantastic Designs, Inc., a full-service search engine marketing, web and graphic design firm. This article is excerpted from her book, Search Engine Visibility (http://www.searchenginesbook.com) published in January 2003 by New Riders Publishing Co. Shari can be reached at shari@grantasticdesigns.com.

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