New International website - what languages, what domains?

A truly International website is a tough proposition

[engine]

If we're going to develop a strategy for an International website to target Europe, how do we start?

What are the top three languages for Western Europe?

What are the most relevant TLDs for those languages?

Which other TLDs should be on the wish list?

[Mike_Mackin]

If we were to envision a website that would serve and be geared to visitors from across the pond, we would look into a partnership arrangement with a company or individual in each country or region. Just the learning curve in the UK would be slow. Take the proper spelling issue. Example: humour and optimisation.

[rencke]

The three top languages are English, German and French. German will cover Germany, Austria and the German speaking part of Switzerland. French, France and the French speaking part of Belgium and Switzerland.

For English a dot-com or a dot-uk will work fine. Dot-coms are also OK for France, but if you want to give an appearance of local presence in Europe, you could use the backdoor to French engines, i.e. a dot-ch (Switzerland) or dot-be site in French. For German, you can use dot-ch or dot-at to get into German engines and directories.

You will find more in the European SEO strategy primer [webmasterworld.com] where the importance of local partnerships is also discussed. I personally do not believe that keywords can be translated straight off and you will find my reasons for that in the primer. So optimizing in languages other than your own should be left to locals. And then, there is the spelling issue.

[heini]

>>For German, you can use dot-ch or dot-at to get into German engines and directories.

I do not think that using a dot.com would present much of a problem for germany. There are huge german sites operating under a dot.com. When contacted directly, the directories would list you anyway.

The language Problem: Apart from SEO Problems I think itīs indispensable to have competent translations for each targeted country in order gain trustworthiness. This is especially true, if your site means to sell stuff. People have a lot of reservations concerning buying online anyway: a foreign language raises the hurdle significantly.
One should at least have a section of ones site translated to all targeted populations.
A contact person in each country, as Mike says, IMO is a must.

[rencke]

>When contacted directly, the directories would list you anyway

I thought Alles Klar required de, at or ch. Are you sure they will accept a dot-com? The search engines will, of course.

[heini]

try this [allesklar.de] search
It is the biggest player in itīs field though.
Oh, before I forget: Itīs absolutely admirable what you have done for this forum
Thank you very much rencke!

[rencke]

Aha! Excellent info! I think they must have changed their policy since I last looked about a year ago.

So, everybody: Germany's biggest and most important directory - Alles Klar - will now accept any domain as long as the pages are in German. In fact they will even accept pages in English, if the subject of the site is about something German. So, you can now have your dot-com about Goethe's litarary works indexed in Alles Klar!

I will update the main entry for German direcories accordingly.

[Eric_Jarvis]

we aren't exactly concentrating on Europe so our figures will be somewhat distorted

however for last month, judging by pages viewed in our various translations it went

Spanish 36.41%
German 21.81%
French 15.93%
Danish 7.58%
Arabic 5.54%
Portuguese 4.26%
Dutch 3.81%
Finnish 1.15%
Chinese 0.75%

though that reflects the length of time I've had to promote the pages too

German and Dutch have been easiest to promote by exchanging links...sites in bothe languages seem to be well organised and open to adding external links

French has been the easiest to submit to SEs, possibly because I know the language better than any of the others

Spanish and Portuguese are very difficult...there aren't a tremendous number of SEs and directories...and many sites in those languages have few or no external links

for Danish I had some expert help from local sources and it leapt briefly up to our third most popular language...it has settled at around that level...given the number of Danish speakers in the world 7% is a huge proportion of Danes on our site

[Mike_Mackin]

I have a question.

What % of European Domains are actually hosted in the USA.

[rencke]

Mike: Do you mean where the sites are actually physically located on a server? I don't think anyone knows, but hosting is a pretty big business in western Europe, so I think that percentage would be very low there. I the eastern half of Europe, infrastructure is way behind in many places, so commercial sites would have a great incentive to get hosting where bandwidth is plentiful and cheap. US suppliers would be an interesting alternative, but are not the only ones. Do a geographical trace on Yahoo.fr and you'll see what I mean.

Eric: I think it is fair to say that the vast bulk of your Spanish traffic is drawn from Latin America. And as to Denmark - let's just say that the professional help you got appears to have been worth every penny. That's pretty impressive.

[Eric_Jarvis]

rencke: "I think it is fair to say that the vast bulk of your Spanish traffic is drawn from Latin America."

around 70%, a huge majority from Mexico...Spain alone seems to rank just below Denmark

rencke: "And as to Denmark - let's just say that the professional help you got appears to have been worth every penny. That's pretty impressive."

it was from instigating and following just this sort of discussion in a Usenet group that contained a number of Danish SE experts...it cost nothing except that I owe some favours when they want English language SE advice