Thanks to some helpful bloggers, there are recaps of the SMX London conference that took place last week.  A few of the sessions were about international SEO and the European markets.  Let’s take a quick look at what was presented:

From “The Global Search Universe:”
The top search languages are:

1. English
2. Chinese
3. Spanish
4. Japanese
5. French
6. German
7. Arabic
8. Portugese
9. Korean
10. Italian

And the top search engines are:

1. Google
2. Yahoo!
3. Baidu (China)
4. MSN
5. NHN (Korea)

(With Chinese and Korean search engines both in the top five (with 3.3 billion and 2 billion searches in August 2007, respectively) and Chinese and Korean languages both in the top 10, it’s easy to see that the Asian markets are still booming and increasing relevant to global search.  Portugese is in the top 10 due to Brazil’s 50 million online citizens.  South American markets are expanding as well, and there are currently about 124 million Spanish speakers online around the world. )

From “European Search Marketing Challenges:”
Lisa Ditelfsen reiterated that SEO in the European market is less developed overall.  Germany, France, and Spain have well developed PPC markets, though.  As competition is less, she points out that it is easier to rank.  She also suggested that keywords can be tested in PPC campaigns to see what works and to gather some market research.

From “International SEO:”

Andy Atkins-Kruger and Dunkin Morris debated the best architecture for international websites (ccTLD or subdomains/subfolders).

Andy also gave some basic tips for good international SEO, including:

• Use UTF-8 character encoding (so your website displays characters properly)
• Be sure to take into account searchers’ behaviors when it comes to accents, special characters, alternate spellings, plurals, etc.
• Use keyword rich URLs
• Get local links (very important for helping to establish relevance in local search engines)
• Get local hosting if possible
• Be sure to pay attention to language content and presentation
• Put your local address on the website!

These sessions all presented some pretty basic information on international SEO, but it’s good to see the topic getting more attention at search marketing conferences.  Three different seminars all on one day, even!

International site design.  How do you do it?  Can you have everything on one site and domain, with multiple subdomains and subdirectories?  Or do you create multiple individual websites?  Is it possible to blend these ideas?  Can it be done easily?  Will I tear my hair out in the process?

These are all very important questions, and how you choose to set up your international internet presence can have a very real effect on how well search engines find and index your website around the world.  Domain extensions can influence how relevant people feel a website is to them.

There a few approaches you can take to this, each with their own benefits and drawbacks.  Cindy Krum also outlined these tactics back in the summer at SMXSeattle.  You can use: multiple websites with multiple domains; one domain with multiple subdomains; or a blended approach.  Let’s look at what each of these offers.

Multiple Sites, Multiple Domains

With this approach, you can set up multiple websites, targeted for specific countries.  For example, you would have a separate domain for your German website (.de), your French one (.fr), and your Japanese one (.jp).  What are the benefits?
•    can target specific countries
•    easy to set up
•    create new websites for new countries as you need them
•    good ranking in country-specific searches
•    increased relevancy to target audience
•    easily adapt content to target audience/market

As you can see, this approach offers flexibility in terms of content and website creation.  You can make a site for a specific country very easily, complete with a greater ability to attract country specific inbound links.  Pages will be indexed easily and you’ll probably be able to get some good visibility in local search engines, especially if other websites in your internet niche are not optimized.

There are a few drawbacks to this approach, most notably that if you have content to update with, you’ll have to do it on every single website (if the content is relevant, of course).  If you have 5 different websites, you’ll have to update content or anything else across the 5 sites.  You’ll also be optimizing each of the websites individually, and depending on your market you might employ different strategies or techniques to do this.  Unless you’re very organized, this could be both time and resource consuming.  Another thing to consider, which Cindy Krum smartly pointed out, is that you’re targeting specific countries, not languages.  This limits the ability of a site labeled .fr to appeal to French-speaker in other countries and territories.  If a country has two languages, like Belgium (French and Dutch), you’ll have to provide for both languages on the website.  Depending on your goals and if you have operations in other French and Dutch speaking areas, this may be a bit of a headache.  Overall rankings for your .com site (if you use one) may be challenged as well, outside of your home territory.

One Domain, Multiple Subdomains

Another approach is to have one global domain (preferably a .com), and multiple subdomains and sub directories.  This architecture has its own benefits as well.
•    Easy set up
•    Send traffic and inbound links to one domain
•    There’ll be more pages to index from the one domain
•    A .com domain is recognized around the world
•    Can target by language, not just country – which helps to reduce duplicate content
•    Can redirect country specific domains to language subdomains

Despite these pluses, the minuses should be considered as well.
•    Your home page has to be in one language – and it will only be indexed in one language
•    Visitors might be ‘confused’ by a home page not in their language
•    A homepage showing in search results might not be in the searcher’s language
•    May not be able to tailor content to specific country markets (which may vary greatly)

If you take this approach, you’ll want to make sure you continue good SEO techniques on all the subdomains, and set up Webmaster tools to target countries for each subdomain.  You also have the added benefit of targeting languages, so with your French pages, you can reach French speakers in France, Canada, Africa, and beyond.  If you operate in France and the Netherlands, you have any issues with content for your Belgian customers solved, because you’ll already have French and Dutch on the website.

Again, with content updates and SEO strategies, you’ll want to stay organized and be able to appeal to visitors across geographic areas.  This approach allows you some greater flexibility in reaching more speakers of particular languages across geographic areas.

The “Blended” Approach to Website Architecture

Your third option is to blend multiple domains and multiple subdomains together.  Cindy Krum feels this is the easiest way to get global visibility.  With this way, you can start with subdomains on your .com website, and branch out into country specific websites as necessary.  It’s more costly to do, as you’re investing in beefing up your .com website first, and then building new websites down the road.  You’d want to set Webmaster tools to geotarget the individual international sites, and not the general .com.

With this way, you’d eventually be taking your visitors to external websites, so there are some extra considerations:
•    Link between external sites and the .com “carefully and logically”
•    Keep general international content on the international site, and specific country content on the country websites
•    Notify visitors that you’re taking them to another website
•    Track your visitors so you can see where your markets really are and what information they’re looking for – as well as seeing what their internet capabilities are on their end

Choosing the overall architecture of your international website(s) is very important, as what path you take will either work with or against any optimization techniques you use.  Keeping the visitors’ experiences in minds is crucial as well, as despite whatever is going on behind the scenes, the front end needs to be a functional, coherent, and relevant website that encourages visitors to stick around and make conversions, whatever they may be.

My recommendation is to use the architecture that best reaches your audiences and allows you to present content that’s most relevant to them, and allows you to be indexed and appear in local search engines abroad.  Your resources, goals, and market will help you determine what’s best for you.

Recently, a new report was released on the numbers of small businesses in the US using social marketing.  Access Markets International (AMI) says that 5% of small business, or 300,000, are using social websites and strategies to promote their names, brands, and services.  They expect that in the next 12 months, that number will rise to approximately 600,000 small businesses.  Obviously, this is a great trend to be a part of in the US, but if, for example, you’re a US company looking to reach users in other countries through social marketing, how do you do it?

I’ve touched this subject a bit before, but let’s revisit some of the basics and how you can cross cultures and languages to reach clients directly.

First, find the social networks your customers and prospects are actually using.  Although American sites like Facebook and MySpace are popular abroad as well, there are a host of other sites that are more popular in other countries, usually because they’re designed with those users in mind and have content, for instance, that would appeal to Russian, Chinese, or British users.  Even in the US, MySpace has launched MySpace Latino to bring in Hispanic and Latino users.  A visit to it shows that content is very different from the regular MySpace, with news, features, and musicians from Spanish-speaking areas promoted.

Of course, how can you make social marketing abroad work for you if you don’t speak the language?  My suggestion would be to set up profiles on websites where you can be an active presence and publish content.  For other sites, set up a profile with some basic information (in that language) on what you do, who you are, and, most importantly, be sure to include links to your other profiles and your website.  If you’ve got the resources, for example, to be actively involved in Russian social networking sites, take that ball and run with it.

Bookmarking websites can also be a great spot to be active in.  Their simple functionalities give them very international appeals, and there are some bookmarking sites, like Mr. Wong, that are targeted towards audiences outside the US.

There’s no magic formula to social marketing, as each small business has unique needs and unique audiences.  The sheer number of social marketing websites gives small businesses many options to explore and to develop a stragegy and set of profiles that works best for them.

To get you started with, here’s a very, very small sampling of social marketing websites around the world:

Bebo (Primarily UK, but with US and Canada audiences as well)

Orkut (Google’s social marketing site is extremely popular in Brazil)

Xiaonei (China’s very popular Facebook-like site)

Kaixin001 (China’s most poupular social marketing and media website)

Odnoklassniki (the Russian Facebook)

SkyRock (More popular in France than Facebook and MySpace combined - SR targets francophone areas, but is also available in English, German, and Spanish)

StudiVZ (The German Facebook, they’ve been sued by Facebook for copying design and features)

Sonico (This site is only a year old, but is now one of the biggest websites of all in Latin America.  A new Portugese version will make sure Sonico has all of Central and South America covered)

Wamba (This Spanish website targets all of Europe, and they’re hoping to reach Latin America as well)

And hundreds more websites.  Check out Wikipedia’s small list of social marketing websites as well.

Your search engine friendly website should have search engine friendly URLs.  If your home site is in English, this means having URLs that (ideally) look like this:

www.mysite.com/url/nice.html or like: www.mysite.com/nice-url.html, but not like:

www.mysite.com/url/really/too/long.html and definitely not like:
www.mysite.com/2343459/2343893skjr/gibberish/messy/url/is/uninviting/to/click_on.html.

Even if your URLs are generated in a database, cart, or CMS, you may have some ability to take one that originally looked like this:
http://www.mysite.com/browse/category.do?cid=11449 to one like:
www.mysite.com/handheld-tools.html?cid=11449.

Why should you have good URLs?  They’re better for both users and search engines.  For users, they’re more likely to click on a URL in the search results that is short and is obviously related to their search.  A study by Marketing Sherpa showed that short URLs were clicked on up to 250% more often than longer ones…even if the short ones appeared below the long addresses.  In your own life, would you rather click on a link in your email that was full of random numbers, escaped characters, and gibberish, or one that read “directions-to-birthday-party”?

For the search engines, easily parsable URLs are a good idea because they’re one more way to alert the engine as to what the content of your page is about.  Keywords in the URLs will also be bolded in the search results, another visual cue to searchers that your page has relevant information.  Good search engine friendly URLs also don’t have too many parameters in them.  It takes too much effort to crawl ones that are, well, too busy.  The URLs should also reflect the information architecture of the site, providing clues as to what the page is about and how it relates to other content on the site (think www.mysite.com/videos/2008/interesting-movie.html - it’s an interesting movie from 2008, and there might be other videos from other years for search engines and visitors to find).

In another language, your translated URLs on your translated site should be equally as clean.
For example, German URLs would read:
www.mysite.de/info/nuetzlich.html if your English site URL was www.mysite.com/info/useful.html.
Or www.mysite.de/eine-ausgezeichnite-url.html (from www.mysite.com/an-awesome-url.html).

Even in a Unicode language, like Chinese, you would want to use Unicode characters when possible.  Although Unicode URLs were not possible for a while, better translations in servers (and browsers) have allowed websites to employ these URLs, giving website owners more flexibility and benefiting users (in Chinese, characters can be transliterated, but often times the transliterated words may have many different meanings, while the original characters vary depending on the word).  A URL with Unicode could look like:
www.mysite.cn/你好 (transliterated: www.mysite.com/nihao) or even www.睡衣.cn (transliterated: www.shuiyi.cn)

In short, SEO friendly URLs for international use aren’t that hard to do.  They just require some good SEO practices combined with your target language.  To recap, here are the most important tips:
•    Keep them as short and simple as possible. Wherever possible, use static URLs without too many parameters.  Short and simple addresses are easy for search einges to crawl and for users to remember.  You want to encourage people to click on your URLs.
•    Use keywords if appropriate. Don’t stuff your URLs full of keywords, but if using a keyword in the URL is applicable, stick it in.  It’ll be highlighted in the search results just like keywords appearing in titles and metas.
•    Translate your URLs. If you’re building a site in German or Spanish, don’t use URLs that are still in English.  You’re missing a valuable opportunity for German and Spanish search engines to see that you have relevant content in those languages.  Even if it’s a short and sweet URL, you might not encourage clicks if searchers can’t read it.
•    Don’t be shy about using Unicode if you’re able to. The DNS, browsers, and Unicode translations have all improved recently.  Domains in Unicode form are becoming increasingly available.  Since website content (and keywords) will be written in Unicode (don’t write your entire website in transliterated Chinese or Russian or Hinidi!!!), why not give yourself the opportunity to begin sticking out in the search results.

Armed with these tips, you should be able to easily write SEO friendly URLs in any language, appealing to users and search engines around the world.

Google Translate has introduced a new widget that can be placed on websites to let visitors translate text content into a language of their choice (assuming it’s one of the 30-odd available). While it might seem like a very convenient and easy way to get your pages translated, let’s take a moment to discuss why this isn’t a viable solution to your international SEO needs.

First off, the translation is done by machine. True, Google has added humans to their translation services as you may have heard, but it’s really a network of volunteer and professional translators available to translate documents upon request (it’s a take it or leave it offer system). The new widget relies on computers to do the work (as do big G’s other translation tools).

Machine translation has improved in recent years (but not always), but it’s still no match for what a human can do with language. There are many linguists working not only at Google but at other facilities around the world to improve the programming and abilities of the computers to translate, but human language is a complex and far from completely understood ability. Word for word translations of content are pretty readable with today’s technology, but they’re still not natural sounding text and will occasionally leave words or phrases untranslated.

The other problem with the widget is that, well, it’s a widget, and a widget does not equal SEO. Simply giving website visitors the ability to translate your page into a language of their choice is not doing anything to increase your visibility in foreign search engines or a good long-term strategy. It also does not show that you’re really in their market and able to meet their needs.

Your customers and industrial partners abroad will need your international websites to be sites designed for their regions and markets, with content produced by humans that encourages them to stay on your site and contact your company. You’ll also need all the traditional SEO techniques that create search engine visibility and long-term website success. Although fun and a bit exciting, Google’s translate widget is not what your professional site needs.

But that’s not to knock it completely. What Google is trying to do, by offering translation tools and access to human translators (if you’re going to use one, by the way, be sure to check out their background to see if they’re really the right translator for your content), is to open up all the information on the web to as many people as possible. Most of the content online is published only in one language, usually the native language of whoever created it. That leaves billions of other users unable to access that because they don’t know the language. With this widget, Google is at least giving website owners a way to make their information a little more accessible to others around the world. You may very well find that for your site, such a widget could have a purpose in the short term.

The widget is not a recipe for long term SEO success, but it is a nice sign that Google is still working very hard to bring information to users, no matter the original language.