New York ist in der Nähe von Atlantik/ Paris auf den Fluss Seine

Kalkutta ist in der Nähe von Gunges/ Londres liegt in der Nähe Themse

While this old salors song that literally means “New York stands on the shores of Atlantic / River Seine flows through Paris / Calcutta sprawls on the banks of River Ganges/ River Thames flows through London“ was quite popular before the advent of jumbos that now transport people from  all over the world, it currently refers to Search Engine Optimization process  on  global dimension. In other words, it involves  International SEO, the aspects of which are detailed below. So, Please follow the stages to see how the process  can help you market your product internationally through multiple contry-specific  Search Engines

Domain Name (Two Types)

There are two types of domain names – Generic top-level domain names (GTLDs) and Country-specific top-level domain names (ccTLDs). While a country-specific domain name may take the from of widgetizer.fr, the generic alternative would be widgetizer.com (org, .info, .biz, etc). However, if you intend to create a multinational / multilingual site, you should go after a generic (gTLD) domain. Even though multiple separate country-specific (ccTLD) domians are also to be considered, let us stick to the gTLD now.

Structure (Variations)

This refers to how you can set up with your strategy with URLs – the options.

Domain Directories – gTLD domain

In this case, all languages would stay on one generic domain, with each lingo residing in its own                 folder. For instance, if you take the widgetizer.com, there would be:

widgetizer.com/en/

widgetizer.com/fr/

widgetizer.com/de/

However, these could be further split into languages up into country codes, such as

Widgetizer.com/en-us

Widgetizer.com/en-gb

Pros and Cons

 While one domain indicates one SEO campaign; creating authority to the /en/directory having a positive indirect impact on /fr/ and /de. it also means one server location;where you would not be able to host the /de/ folder in Germany and the /fr/ folder in France which may impact load speeds.

Translation

Now that the structure has been taken care of, there is the necessity of populating the site with multi-lingual content. While some sites remain contented by way of using English language across their geographic domains, translating the content in local lingo is surely the key to ranking in the relevant search engine. This can, however, be done in the following two ways.

(a)    Specialized Translation- Since in-house translating is a difficult proposition, outsourcing the content is mostly advisable. Elance.com, in this respect, can become quite helpful for translating in different European and other languages. In fact, they also have a huge retinue of freelance translators who can turn out pretty good jobs at remarkably low price and in minimum time.

(b)   Google Translate- Free and incredibly simple to use, Google translate will let you switch content between 65 different languages. Incidentally, it may not be the best, but considering the high cost translating larger content in non-English language being quite high, it is, ,of course, the second choice.

Markup

Even though language markup is not so widely used, the markup written in HTML tells Google and other search engines about the language a page is written in as well as where other languages of similar pages reside. Incidentally, even though Google is intelligent enough to interpret a website’s multi-lingual content efficiently, demonstrating the exact URLs of language variations is a different cup of tea.

Hreflang and evading Duplicate Content

Before going into the details, let us make it quite clear that using hreflng helps avoid duplicate   content issues on one hand while on the other it provides protection from accidental changes while translating content fro language to another. But what is hreflang and what lies under that ridiculous name?

Well, it is an attribute which is used inside link elements that go in the section of a page, and akin to other link elements, such as canonicals, favicons, etc, remain hidden from users and communicate only with robots.  It is labeled as hreflang because in HTML, href means ‘hypertext reference’ and is used to code all HTML links while lang obviously stands for language. Therefore, it simply means ‘a linked reference to a language’.

However, you must remember that whenever you are creating a page that has language variation, you need to use hreflang link element.

Keyword Research

In order to keep your translated content as much identical to the original across the board, certain on-page elements, such as Title elements need change to keep in conformity with your new keyword research.

(a)    Segmenting each language is essential – Never ever overlap English and German or German and    French pages. When an user lands on, for instance, domain.com/de/ then you need to ensure that all navigation and internal links point to other pages within the same directory. In this case, not only will your user not risk confusion (and Google will see this), but you reinforce your focus on that particular language – you’re showing Google that this page is in German, and look, so is everything else here, so please rank me in your .de engine! 

(b)   URLs – Even though we are quite familiar with URLs as just another on-page facto with solo-language SEO, yet feel helpless when confronted with international rankings. Since translated URLs get overlooked too often, make sure that yours contain spoken language of that region and if necessary, optimize it accordingly.

(c)Address details are necessary too – When you are actually planning to operate at a physical location in one of the countries that you are targeting, then include your office details either on   the landing pages or at least on your contact page. Mark them up with microdata  (www.schema.org/place) and of course, have a Google+ Local account for that address.

Link Building

Link building requires exactly the same practice that you’re used to. Ranking for a new geographical area only requires a slight change of attention.

Build Links from Relevant ccTLDs

If you’re trying to rank a French page on your site, then attempt to acquire .fr links for example. There are few better signals that your content deserves a French ranking than from a French domain.

However don’t begin to think about rejecting links from other ccTLDs or gTLDs in absolute favour of a totally relevant domain extension. Great links are still great links, just do your best, in this situation, to gear your link profile slightly more towards .fr’s.

And finally  Anchor Text distribution

International SEO, to be specific, offers you wonderful opportunities for distributing your anchor texts more profusely yet with the same degree of attention and assiduity. Reflect on mixing the lingo of your anchor texts among local and English with precise, practical as well as generic – all being thrown in an international melting pot. The result, we may assure you, will be fantastic.