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To be able to offer pan-european SEO, some professional optimizers are seeking partnerships, building networks.
Is this a useful approach to european SEO?
Experiences and opinions are welcome!
please do not use this discussion to either ask for or offer services for specific countries/languages
Ive tried the translation game in a number of European countries and have optimised translated pages adhering to U.S based algos which have produced limited results.
I cant see how you guys in Europe cant benefit by forging partnerships.
Whilst many of us who speak English can compete on an equal footing on the U.S based engines, its very difficult to take on one of you guys in your backyard!
There are a number of SEO consortium / partnerships who share substantial client bases as well as knowledge. Whetehr theyve extended their offerings accross Europe is another question to be answered by one of them
imho, i think it's the best way to follow, because it's very difficult to have the right expertise for every european nation.
Ok, if you have only to submit a site locally, you can find on the Net some useful guidelines (or you can use Nielsen Netrating's Web properties to find the most visied portals, search engines, directories).
But what about search engine optimization and/or positioning?
Not only you have to know the "secrets" and the guidelines of every local search engine, but you have to optimize textual contents, too.
I've read somewhere in the Net an article about non-english search engine optimization, in which the author suggests to use automatic translation services like altavista's babelfish... well, it's better to forget this suggestion, because of the poor quality of translations. For example, no italians will make a search for "in linea agenzia di corsa" (babelfish translation for "online travel agency"; the right translation is "agenzia viaggi online"). Italians love their mother tongue and don’t like seeing it massacred:-). (ok, my written English is massacring the English language, too. Sorry :-)
Partnerships? They're welcome.
I physically sat there with translators and went through S/E 's and Directories one at at a time. Took roughly 1 full day to register for each language.
In this case we actually found that our Directory submissions were more positive than than the search engines as we had direct control over the titles and descriptions we were entering for each language.
Our search engine success was limited due to:
1 The site was almost all dynamincally
generated.
2. 1 set of Metatags on the home page to cover all languages!! - lack of SEM knowledege at the time.
To the best of my knowledge the best way to acheive European / global coverage is to actually have individual sites in their local languages and even registered with a local domain and Unique IP if possible.
e.g.
www.mysite.fr
www.mysite.de
www.mysite.se
They can still all be linked together under the dot com,
So many people have their multilingual sites running off databases for content management reasons and have them all under the dot com domain and the individual languages are many levels deep in the directory structure or are generated on the fly.
some food for thought for you....
Why? because national directories often demand a local extension for listing and if they accept .com in the local language they are more particular.
ODP will probably accept multiple listings more easily.
Google will allow several SERP listings with different country codes. With all languages under one .com you never get more than two listings. (check for mobile phone Nokia e.g.).
I guess you have to be carefull with Google that the different language versions do not interlink to often!
When the issue becomes domain name strategies, trademark issues, and questions about hosting and whether or not multilingual sites is a good thing I believe it's slightly off topic.
You may of course have a business that handles all of the above, but I don't think I would label that as mainly a SEO. ;)
In the process of planning a lot of questions come up, Searching for information on the web often is a tedious task - much of the best info is only available in local languages. Without getting too selfpromotional it's fair to claim that the European forums here at WmW are pretty unique.
Still - for a detailed plan on localizing a site this info can only get you started. Local help is in most cases a must.
So how many people does a website owner want to deal with? Promoting his site in a foreign language and country is an organic process - from chosing domain names to obtaining them, from researching keywords to implementing them, from researching SEs and directories to submission, from researching the local market and competition to finetuning his own appearance.
Agreed - this is more than plain SEO. It's localization.
By "formalised structure" I mean that the different parties come together and work out guidelines and routines that shall be implemented in, and understood by each of the partner-companies. That way you can approach multinational European companies and assist them in the whole of Europe.
I am not sure about the case to have multiple local domains?...thinking to follow a strategy of having domains like
www.ES.blabla.com
www.DE.blabla.com
www.FR.blabla.com
of course the ideal might be to have an autolanguage redirection script but this will not help at all the SERP as this is the case;(
I am not sure about the case to have multiple local domains?
In terms of trademark management it may be a good idea to grab a number of ccTLDs (as well as gTLDs) for a trademark.
How to use the domain names is another question, and the answer may be different in different countries.
Another issue regarding trademarks is that you may often find that they may be taken by others in some countries, or they may not work well even if they're available.
Adapting your online service to different countries is a much broader issue than just SEO and keyword juggling. You'd probably deal with web designers, ad agencies and lots of other people long before you need SEO.
