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!

Autumn in the UK’s Search Marketing world is rapidly becoming synonymous with British ‘leg’ of the excellent conference series from Search Marketing Expo. The second SMX London kicked off with venerable Chris Sherman introducing a quality Microsoft double act which looked at the latest offerings from this major search engine.

ZhaoHui Tang, the Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft adCenter commenced the presentations by discussing the latest from AdCenter labs and drilling down into the information now available, even looking at the topical issue of the elections and looking at demographics related to searches around that topic. The audience were introduced to the downloadable analysis tool which identifies click through rate for various different keyword phrases and highlighted the functionality of Adcenter labs which can also look at search funnels and conversion funnels.

Nathan Buggia, the Lead Program Manager from Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center introduced the Webmaster Center – relationship for portal web publishers.  He kicked off with a live demo of how webmaster center interacts with publishers to offer support and advice in helping them to enhance their web sites.  Nathan demonstrated using live data from MSN, identifying pages not found and other errors within Microsoft’s (millions of) pages.  As with Google webmaster tools, to ensure privacy of data verification of the web site is required before information like this is provided.  Like Google, it shows 404 errors,  pages blocked by robots.txt file, etc.  It also identifies URLs with too many parameters which could cause an issue for the crawlers. All of the data provided in the webmaster center are actionable and where they are highlighted by one search engine will probably be true of all and will occur with all of the major search engines.  Nathan focused in on a couple of areas to give the audience a feel for the tools:

Outbound links. In addition to demonstrating who you are linking to, this function also identifies pages that you are linking to that are malware, for instance.  A filter can be applied to only show this information.  This also allows you to identify all of the pages on your site that link to this URL, for instance.

Keywords.  Web site owners want to ensure that he highest ranking page is the highest converting page.  Microsoft gives pages a Page Score – is a proxy for the MSN version of page rank.  In broad terms, 5 ‘buckets’ means a well regarded page.

Web site owners want more information about their customers but also they want help with web site placement and visibility plus information on ROI which is the feedback from webmasters and this is their continued aim.

Microsoft has been working on these tools for about 18 months and there is, according to Nathan, much more to come.  They have a 3 part strategy to help internet marketers:

1. Best results – relevance is the Number 1 investment in search.  Microsoft are making huge gains in terms of relevance.
2. Helping people find new information & ‘get stuff done’.  Looking at users:  what do they want? User intent is key.  Looking for those 10 blue links is only wanted about 40-50% of the time.  Sometimes people are looking for help to understand something & refining their search queries over time to facilitate this.  These explorer searchers want a richer experience.  Microsoft is wanting to deliver this.
3. Business model of search.  Today cost per click is the driving model.  But is there more that can happen.  Live search has been exploring cash back and cost per action.  How does that change the dynamic of the equation?  This has big implications for the future.
   

Chris and the audience then asked a variety of questions, including :

What is the best piece of advice that Nathan and ZhaoHui give?

Build really good stuff.  Microsoft has a bunch of people with PHD’s – if it is good, Microsoft can find it!

In 5 years, what will we be talking about then?

Advertising market size will grow – systems platforms will be more connected and option based according to ZhaoHui,  maybe for paid; for display ads; for search.  Everything will be much more transparent and with real time options based to assist the user.  They will be easy to manage and with lots of tools.

According to Nathan, this room (the Edinburgh Room at the New Connaught Rooms) won’t be big enough to hold SMX London in 2014.  Search will be a much richer experience.  At that time, we will reminisce back to the fond old days of 10 blue links.  The idea of measurable ROI will continue to affect advertising throughout.  Fortune 500 or global 100 companies will be substantially more sophisticated in their online interaction.

An excellent start to an interesting first day at SMX London 2008 with an exciting lineup of industry experts.