Your main website has a .com or .org address but if you are looking to target different countries, it makes sense to have localized websites that serve audience of a particular geographic region (or language). For instance de.abc.com may target users from Germany while abc.in may target Indian traffic.
The next problem – how do you optimize your site for ranking in local or country specific search engines. For instance, you want your German version to rank high in google.de while the Indian version should be available in google.co.in.
Seth at iCrossing offers some great insight on how search engines determine relevancy:
- Where the site is hosted: Websites perform best for natural search when they are hosted in the country they are targeting.
- Links pointing at the site: Are the majority of links to this site coming from other websites relevant to Germany? Or are the majority of links from countries outside of Germany using anchor-text in English?
- What language is used on the website? The language that the copy is written in and tags such xml: lang tags signal to search engines that the content is designed for a German audience.
- Local address information: Including the local address in the footer on every page of the site provides additional information: city, postal code, phone number that search engines can use to make the connection between a domain and a country.
- Google Webmaster Tools geo-targeting setting: If a site is using a generic TLD, like a dot-com, setting the geo-targeting to inform Google that the site is targeting Germany is recommended.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/seo-for-country-search-engines/12660/
Tags: inspiration, seo, Internet
