Targeting two countries with one site

[Johan007]

The website aim is to get students from an non-English speaking country into the UK. The website is hosted in the UK with a .com and is fine for when students abroad search via Google.co.uk but the site obviousely will not apear in their own country search.

I wish Search Engines used the HTML lang attribute, I do not want to host the site abroad.

What advice would you give me?

[tedster]

You can buy a domain that uses the non-English country's ccTLD [iana.org] and serve your content there. This will work best if you host the domain in that country and translate your content into the country's own language.

[steveb]

"but the site obviousely will not apear in their own country search."

Why wouldn't it? You have no issue here. Use the content language html code and you can rank without any problems.

Country specific tlds and hosting do help a bit, but .com's hosted anywhere are only at a tiny disadvantage in any language.

[wheel]

>>>Country specific tlds and hosting do help a bit, but .com's hosted anywhere are only at a tiny disadvantage in any language.

I disagree. Country specific TLD's and hosting location, or some combination of those two seem to play a large part in the rankings in the cc TLD's I watch.

I'd be tempted to put up a second domain and get it hosted in the country you want to rank in.

[fishfinger]

More than that, country-specific hosting, or a pointed/parked country specific domain is actually ESSENTIAL to even feature in a regional index.

It's really hard to illustrate this without being specific.

There is a famous American car manufacturer whose one-word name means 'avoid'. They have a .com and a .co.uk site.

If you do 'site:name.com' in Google.co.uk 'UK only results' there are NO results. Now switch to 'web results' and there are.

This is because they don't host in the UK.

[steveb]

I didn't mention anything about co.uk versus not. That's totally different as they are both in English.

The issue is a .com with non-English content on some of the pages. A site like that can easily compete with .de hosted in Germany. the .de has an edge, but its not enormous. Just looking at one highly competitive term on google.de, the first nine results are coms, nets and orgs. A de doesn't appear until tenth.

Again, it certainly is better to use a specific tld hosted in the target country, but it is not essential at all to rank terrifically in a regional index. Total fiction.

[rainborick]

You might consider targeting specific countries using a subdirectory or subdomain dedicated to each one. That way you can select a separate geographic target for each of them in the Google Webmaster Tools. You just add the subdirectory or subdomain to the Webmaster Dashboard and use the setting in the Tools menu on each. Remember, language and geo-location are largely two separate issues. Just avoid duplicate content and you could do pretty well as long as the site's overall ranking strength is sufficient to warrant complete indexing and decent ranking.