(bright music)
- [David] International SEO is about promoting
and optimizing your content
in order to make the site visible to a target market
or audience across multiple countries and/or languages.
Depending on your business objectives,
it could be that your site just needs
to provide specific content
to specific language populations.
Think of a US company that only serves the US
but still recognizes the need to cater
to a Spanish-speaking population.
Or, a Canadian organization that needs to attract
both English and French speakers.
Or maybe you're a multinational corporation
with locations in multiple regions all around the world
and you need to not only have content available
in local languages but maybe even entire websites dedicated
to these countries.
Not only would you need
a French Canada internationalization,
you would also need a French version for France,
and maybe business conditions dictate what you can
or can't sell in each country.
Or if you're a news publisher,
you may have a completely different set of content,
country by country.
As you begin to develop your international SEO plan,
you'll need to make sure it reflects your business needs
and think carefully about whether you're marketing
to specific languages, regions, or a combination of both.
If the goal of your business is simply
to provide the same content in multiple languages,
then you'll be focusing on optimizing
your site's translated content
in order to be found by search engines.
A multilingual site simply offers users a choice
of more than one language.
Search engines have come a long way
with respect to language detection.
And these days, you can assume they'll be able
to easily pick up on the languages
you have your content translated into.
But no matter how smart they might be,
you're still going to want to take advantage
of some of the techniques to send strong signals
and indicators for the language you're using
on a page of content.
Including the target language in a URL structure,
such as in a subdomain or a subfolder
is one tactic that tends to work very well for this.
If you were a search engine crawling through these pages,
the use of either a subfolder or subdomain
with internationally recognized language codes
would send you a strong language signal
and help you to index this content appropriately.
For multinationals and large enterprises, however,
we'll have to be able to accommodate
more than just a translation of the same content
into different languages.
Often there'll be different offices operating
in different countries with different business environments,
and your optimization efforts
will be spent making sure visitors can discover
and consume that regionalized content
in their local flavor of language.
The Spanish spoken in Spain, for example,
is very different from that of Mexico,
and that's a very different Spanish
from what's spoken in Argentina.
You can see how all these combinations
can become pretty complex,
but a simple example for North America
would be a website targeting the Canadian and US markets.
Even though both are primarily English-speaking countries,
there are differences and nuances
in the languages that you'll need to consider and address.
And when you do, you'll find that citizens
in the respective countries will not only appreciate
the content for its relevance and readability
but also find it easier to discover your site
in the search engines.
And of course, there are large markets
of French speakers in Canada
and Spanish speakers in the US
that will need to be accommodated as well.
We also need to consider different search engines
around the world.
Our North American example is likely pretty Google
or Bing-centric, but globally,
there are other search engines
you need to be thinking about.
In China, there's Baidu,
Russia and Eastern European countries use the Yandex,
and Naver is a popular platform across South Korea.
You'll want to research your markets
to understand the relevant search engines
and adapt your strategies accordingly,
making sure to sign up for any publisher
or webmaster type tools that are offered.
At this point, you are hopefully realizing
that there's not a single right answer
to the way you'll handle which search engines,
languages, and regions you'll target.
But instead, this will largely be driven
by your business model.
Whether your site's focus is multilingual, multi-regional,
or both, you'll need to pay close attention
to how it's structured
and how search engines are able to discover
and understand your content
so that they can deliver it
to the target markets when they're searching.
(bright electronic music)