Good morning, and welcome to the coverage of the International search summit. I am really looking forward to the day as it was one of the best events I went to last year.
Andy started the summit with a top tip session for international and multilingual SEO.
1) Great research and planning
Most of the time an international campaign takes a lot more planning than a typical local campaign. Check that the products are appealing to the local market, local trends and behaviour are critical in launching a successful multinational campaign.
2) SEO and the 3 Cs – Content, connections and compatibility. However there was one large C missing in the multilingual approach and that is culture.
3) Searching and Connecting are fundamental human needs everywhere.
4) All peoples are equally sophisticated, impatient and lazy. The brainpower of a caveman is the same as what’s used in a searcher so you need to be user focused.
5) Trust is pivotal and needs to be built through cultural relevance
6) User behaviours are environment driven. Use the payment logos of the local markets, Asia has totally different credit cards
7) Do your research, web certain has a great deal of information online, use it to uncover trends
8) Find out which areas to target, quality research will ensure you avoid going down a blind alley
9) A common mistake is to focus on cost and not on ROI, translation is often money down the drain
10) Translate that which is going to drive ROI not just everything
11) Don’t forget the other engines, Google isn’t #1 everywhere.
12) Mobile reaches other parts, India and Indonesia are emerging markets and mobile is important to consider
13) Don’t abuse keywords, language detection is complex you need to preserve character sets and do local based
keyword research. Keywords do not translate.
14) Long tail differs in different languages. Dutch and German has the longest, English is in the middle and Scandinavia is the shortest.
15) Keyboards – they were designed to slow people down and it affects the way people search. The French keyboard have accents right near the edge so they are often overlooked, German is the opposite.
16) English people tend to search for plurals but this isn’t the case in all languages
17) Never look at one page out of context, you need to look at the entire picture
18) The navigation might need to change in different markets
19) Three types of content – UGC, Translated and Maintenance of that content
20) UTF-8 content management system
21) Watch out for calendars
22) Effective geo targeting strategy
23) Don’t duplicate content, youll run into search engine issues if you have a one-world policy
24) The global local web – new domain names are being registered
25) Local links are gold
26) Smart Geo locators are important – interlinking is very important. The language selectors should be on a page by page basis
27) Don’t rate local advice over expert advice use local people to guide culture decisions but not search marketing ones
