Singapore Search Marketer
Traffic Acquisition Consultant | Bring Quality Traffic to Businesses

Here’s a question that many have asked and I bet are still trying to figure out, when it comes to international site optimization what should be done.

• Should you use local top level domains or use country specific sub domains?
• Should you use the same content from your .com site or customize it?
• Should you use the same design layout for consistency with your main .com or use a totally different version?

Your company has plans to expand to multiple markets but can’t really get the organic search strategy for the localized sites penned down.

What to do? Here’s a list of guidelines that I use when thinking about international seo.

• Use local top level domains if possible. You need to check with tech to see if this is cost effective. If not I will opt for the Sub domain route and the sub folder route last.
• Countries that don’t use English as their primary language is straight forward use their native language. But for English speaking markets, you will need to localize the content to make it fit the locals.

  How? Some tips

Use their local lingo in content

Understand culture terms

Display products and services in local currency

Run promotions based of local events

Having a local mailing address is a plus.

• Usability is also a must, localize your user interface to fit the locals. If your users don’t like your site layout they wouldn’t stay and that’s bad.
• Site structure can be the same as your .com domain or if you want change is slightly to fit the logical flow of the locals. Remember to use local lingo in the URL structure as well.
• Set the target markets in Webmaster tools for each site so that Google knows who the site is targeting.
• Getting inbound links from local sites, this can be slightly harder to get but its a must.

So this is my take on international SEO, do you have any other items to add to the list? Please feel free to drop your suggestions in the comments below

Just posted my last post on some random snapshots of my day to day encounters with the PC, showing how wonky it can be or maybe how random i can get

So I was just Google my name for fun and I am amazed that Google has indexed and is ranking my latest post in the 2nd indent. I know its not new and Google has increased its speed of indexing but still its pretty cool for Google to index and rank so fast even for a small site like mine

Doing some computer maintenance and found some of these snapshots that I taken over the past few months that I experienced with my battle proven Dell Vostro. So here’s some of the snapshots

Chrome Tab dies on me

Chrome crashed, needs to restart

Wego.com during Beta phrase

Checking out the Google Adsense adreview center

Creative in Google admanager broken

I love Google maps, its a great help better then Street directory. But whats best about the product is the little bugs that happen from time to time, like Google creating phantom town in Australia.

Here’s the story on theage.com.au

Here's another keyword research tool that you might find useful while doing SEO. Besides using the normal wordtracker, keyword density and Google external keyword tool, try using this as a complementary research tool while doing keyword research.

Read more – Niche Keyword Competition Checker Free SEO Research Tool

Check this out, this is something that Google is working on for the past few months. This is Google's new web search algorithm and infrastructure upgrades. Google is asking for us to test the platform at sanbox2.google.com, would this affect how we optimize websites ? I havent tried but would be playing around the web site just to see how different is it from the current version.
Google Search – Next Generation Sandbox Testkit

As part of my work, I use Google Counter Script which is an addon for Greasemonkey. The script helps me add a numeric count at the left handside of each search results. This is a great help if you are looking for search rankings (although I am looking at this lesser by the day due to other search factors).

If you use this script as well for a long time you might see that the counter doesnt appear. What happened? Basically Google did some changes to its search results <div> tags and that caused the script to break.

If you like to a quick fix, here’s the source code that will fix the current SERPs on Google.I modded this from Bruno Torres’s Google Counter script. Basically added the parts that are bold in the sourcecode below.

// ==UserScript==

// @name            Google Counter
// @author          Bruno Torres <http://brunotorres.net/>
// @namespace       http://brunotorres.net/greasemonkey/
// @description     Adds an ordinal number at the left side of each search result on Google results pages. It’s useful if you want to know promptly what position your site is in, whithout counting results “by hand”.
// @include         http://google.*/*
// @include         http://www.google.*/*

// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
var ps = document.getElementsByTagName(‘li’);
var spans = document.getElementsByTagName(‘span’);
var page = 0;
var count = -1;
var num = window.location.href.match(“num=([0-9]+)”);

num = (num == null)? 10 : num[1];

for (var i = 0, span; span = spans[i]; i++)
if (span.className == ‘i’)
page = span.innerHTML – 1;

for (var i = 0, p; p = ps[i]; i++) {
if (p.className == ‘g’){
count++;
p.innerHTML = ‘<strong>’ + ((count + 1) + (page * num)) + ‘. </strong>’ + ps[i].innerHTML;
}else if (p.className == ‘g w0′){
count++;
p.innerHTML = ‘<strong>’ + ((count + 1) + (page * num)) + ‘. </strong>’ + ps[i].innerHTML;
}
}

})();

Was asked about setting up priority campaigns on Google ad manager yesterday. Here’s a video that I found that would help explain the line items priority settings.

Wish I had watched this earlier before transferring the campaigns from my old adserver.

Check out this GAM line item delivery priority video

Finally finish my setup of GAM and succefully tested keyword targeting for my site. If you used Openx and want to try moving over to GAM, the initial phrase might be overwhelming. Reason Google Admanger’s interface isn’t really that user friendly (at least for me) from the on start.

I am a person that normally dive into things and learn as I go, but i had to read a quick setup guide about adspots and placements before being able to get a grab on GAM. After you get a grab on what adspots and placements are, the rest is pretty much a breeze.

Now its time to migrate all the banner campaigns that I have on Openx to GAM and see how it goes from there.

Whats your experience with Google admanager or openx?