Latest Post

So, you run a business which works on a global scale and are looking for search engine optimisation to promote your business. You’re probably wondering where you would even start with this. The mistake many businesses make is to buy a .com domain thinking that this will enable them to use the website to market all areas of the world. This is not the case, and so I have included some information on the basics to help you get started with reaching your global goal.

Firstly, you need to understand how search engines work. Search engines want the information they provide to be relevant and useful to the searcher. If that searcher happens to be German-speaking and based in Germany then obviously the most relevant results would be those provided in their native language, from within that country. Therefore, you need to look at having a multitude of websites, each aimed at providing information for each individual country you want to target.

This will involve the following:

• Buy the domain names relevant to the countries you want to target e.g. www.companyname.co.uk for the UK, www.companyname.us for the United States, www.companyname.fr for France and www.companyname.cn for China etc. This will help Google to recognise that the site is geo-targeted to a specific country.

• Another way to help the search engine to recognise that you are wanting to target users in a specific country is to ensure that the site is held on a server within that country. Therefore you will need to undertake some research into hosting companies.

• Include the website content in the native language of the country being targeted.

• Lastly, if you have global offices, mention the office address on the relevant website.

By creating sites in this way, search engines such as Google will recognise that each website is targeted at a different location. This will prevent the issues of duplicate content across the sites. For example, the UK and the US are both English speaking countries and will therefore contain the same content. However, because the sites are domains targeted towards different countries, Google will recognise this and will therefore not penalise either of the sites for duplicate content.

Gemma Neesham
Project Manager

More Search Engine Optimisation News: Google has put a great deal of effort into preserving its motto of “do no evil”. The recent news that Google may (but probably won’t) be  pulling out of China completely due to China’s censorship laws is, I believe, at best a cover for the fact that they can’t stand being the second largest market share holder in the world’s largest market.

Western Internet companies (including Google) often fail to break into the Chinese market because they simply fail to understand the different culture over there. You only have to watch a couple of Chinese TV shows to realise how different it is to our western one. Imagine the problems setting up the branch of a multinational business over there. So bearing this in mind, Google needed a way of pulling out (or at least reducing its services) without losing face and admitting defeat.

That’s not to say that China didn’t try to hack Google. It’s just that if its business over there was doing better than a 20 percent market share for internet search, Google would happily ignore it.

The bottom line is, no matter what they claim, this isn’t about helping the Chinese people. It’s about making money from them. If it was about morals, Google would not have gone to China in the first place.

Simon Davies
SEO Programmer