Moderated by Vanessa Fox of Search Engine Land, this session looked at how companies need to address working with other language markets.  Duncan Morris, director at Distilled was first to present: 

International SEO

By targeting multiple countries, you can generate more business, revenue, etc. However, generic TLD’s (top level domains - such as .com) can cause issues for local search engines.  Duncan recommended using geo location:  redirecting users based upon their IP address can be a good idea, he says.  Although companies should remember that search engines tend to browse with an American IP address and this may not work for the search engines as they would not be able to view all of your content.  Information architecture is king, he stressed, you must have a way for the search engines to browse to every page.

Duncan came up with a key statistic:  to reach 90% of the world’s 1.2 billion internet users, companies must support 20 or more languages.  Duncan recommended making sure that you separate languages on a page and came up with a list of factors to ‘flick the switch’ 

• Have a local tld
• Hosting location
• Add to Google local
• Physical address on page
• Inbound link profile
• Webmaster central - try not to rely on webmaster central. Country doesn’t equal language. E.g. French also includes Canada - with Google Webmaster Tools you can target to France BUT not to French users

Duncan referenced Ikea’s site structure:  Ikea.com/en & Ikea.com/fr for the two different language pages.  According to him, would the following structure be better?

• Ikea.com/us/en
• Ikea/com/uk/en
• Ikea.com/ca/en
• Ikea.com/ca/fr

This would allow you to write content targeting the relevant country not just the relevant language.  He explained that there are pros and cons of one powerful domain:

• Pro - All of your links go to one domain 
• Con - Lower CTR (click through rate) / conversion rate vs ccTLD e.g. .com not as good in france as .fr;  What should you put on the home page? ; American pages often outrank British pages

 Then he highlighted the pros and cons of cc TLD:

• Pro - Geo targeting much easier; Improved CTR / conversion rate especially where the TLD indicated the language spoken (e.g. Italy)
• Con - Link building is much harder;  Can lead to dupe content issues; the .com still often outranks other English tld’s

Andy Atkins-Kruger from Web Certain was next to present and offered the audience…

Low hanging apples for International SEO

…in which he eloquently presented a no-nonsense, well researched way forward for companies wanting to go international.

• 1. Language & Content Presentation - spidering > language detection > language detection process (some languages have same character sets and so the SE need to look at common letter strings)
• 2. ccTLDs or local hosting: Country domains are the right way to go.
• 3. Input methods impact search - French keyboard complex so many people don’t use accents
• 4. No direct translation - city breaks / 30% off don’t work
• 5. Use a smart geo selector - for example the IBM drop down menu
• 6. Local links
• 7. Keyword URLs
• 8. 301’s - sort out the fundamentals - meta refreshes, pages not found
• 9. Adopt a global PR strategy
• 10. Consider: plurals accents, alternate spellings, disaggregation, inflection, prepositions
• 11. Don’t translate meta tags - LOCALISE them. Use keywords and use correct content.
• 12. Use UTF-8 encoding - presentation of characters on the page 

Andy suggested testing locally in one region.  Choose a pilot country, he said, and see what works.  Italy often gets chosen as the testing environment as only country that speaks Italian, for instance.

Although the last session of SMX London 2008, Day 1, lots of information was imparted to the audience and the delegates went on to the SMX-organised networking session (before going on to the London SEO bash) fired up and ready to talk SEARCH!