How to cash in on some European traffic

[Benj]

Hi guys,
I own a site that has content that people are looking for on a global basis and I want to get some exposure from the European search engines. How do I go about getting my site into their search engines? It's a .com site. Hopefully I won't have to register my site in all the different European suffixes (.co.uk, .fr, etc.)

[Chris_Allan]

Hey Benj,

I am dealing with a similar issue. I read in Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch that you must either have your site translated into the language of the engine you are posting too or have the appropriate domain (.de. .ch etc...) Translations can get expensive (especially for a good one) and don't trust a computer to do it. They can often screw things up. Buying up a few foreign domains may be the best route to test the foreign market.

[georged]

Yes, what Chris_Allan said.
Firstly, many of the european engines won't index you if you don't have the local domain.
Secondly many european country nationals run searches almost exclusively in their own language and on their local search engines, e.g. Germany and fireball.de .
Translations are expensive indeed. One company we make sites for asked us to make eight or nine sites for the european countries they operate in. We made sure they knew that if they wanted translations, they should have it done professionally and they would have to pay. They did it, because they knew the importance of having it done.
Talk to any european national, they'll tell you the same thing.

[Benj]

Pretty interesting stuff guys. Thanks for helping me out.

[henki]

Not quit. It is not that important to have the domain suffix. Not enough SEs care, that I would recommend you to invest in domains.

The site or page that you submit must be in the local language though. Auto translators are not the best solution. But you can auto translate it and send it to a native for corrections. That has proven to be the cheapest way to translate pages.

[rencke]

Been travelling the Sweden-Norway border region for a couple of days of seminars, so I haven't been able to participate in this discussion until now.

First: Welcome to WebmasterWord Chris_Allan. You've come to the right place and I hope you will like it here.

Benj: Here is a first tentative and cautious conclusion from the material gathered so far on European search engines:

There are four types of local European SE:s:
1 Those who will index all pages regardless of language and domain. (Very few)
2 Those who will index pages in own language regardless of domain. (Often the leading engine in each country.)
3 Those who will only index own domain, regardless of language. (Lots of these)
4 Those who only index local domain sites that are also in the local language. (Even more of these)

1 and 2 are the ones you should interest yourself in. 3 and 4 will probably not make it in the long run, since their indexes will be too limited for their users. Dot-coms are very popular over here and locking them out is not a good idea for an SE. Getting local domains requires a local business in most cases - you will find the info about this in each of the discussions for the specific countries. That way is not cost effective for most sites, since it requires a law firm to handle a local company for you.

georged's comment "many european country nationals run searches almost exclusively in their own language and on their local search engines" is very important to keep in mind. Only 28% of all Europeans understand English at all.

Henki's suggestion to machine translate pages and then send them to a local specialist for polishing is good and cost-effective advise. (But never, ever use machine translations on the site itself.) We are letting local people have a oneliner about translation services in the main entry for each country. A few have used that possibility so far, and there will be more as time goes by.

The smart way to handle this is to put foreign language pages on a dot-com in the local language, i.e. TopLocalLanguageKeyword.com or, if not available, then TopLocalLanguageKeyword1-TopLocalLanguageKeyword2.com Make the title identical to the url (except for .com) and if you can - put the same as H1. This will give you a real boost in rankings in most engines. You should make first page for Kwd1.

[Benj]

Good info, good info. Thanks. I'm going to focus on England first since the native language there is English and I won't have to do any translating. Also, the England version of Goto has lots of good keywords for sale that nobody has bought for even a penny.