I’ve been writing a lot about off-site techniques and news lately, so I thought it’d be best to return to on-page factors that can affect your website’s visibility in the search engines. One of the most important is content. I recently wrote about this for the Ecreativeworks newsletter, but it’s worthwhile covering here as well – with a little extra emphasis on making content accessible (and useful!) to people across different language and geographic regions.  We’ll look at your ideas and your keywords today, and discuss some other optimization factors in a second post later.

Creating Valuable Original Content

First things first.  What do you write about? How do you maximize the wealth of information you have on your topic?  Most importantly, how do you keep your ideas original and interesting to read, meeting the needs of your customers?  Here are some ideas and tips for doing just that:

• Break your content across multiple pages. Doing this provides two benefits: 1) you’ll be able to better focus the text around specific themes; and, 2) you’ll make it easier for both your visitors and search engine spiders to interact and follow your text.  Most likely you’ll end up with the added benefit of both sticking around on your site, following links and learning more about you.  (Breaking content across multiple pages is a topic that probably deserves its own post, as there are right and wrong ways to do this.)
• Read what others in your niche have written or provided on their websites. Sun Tzu once said (roughly), “know your enemy.”  Somewhat of the same mindset should apply when you’re looking for ideas for content.  Take a look at the other websites in your industry to see what useful or lack-of information they’ve provided. This will help you set yourself apart from them by providing sorely lacking information or presenting similar information in an updated, perhaps more useful, fashion.
• Be original! Taking a look at your competitors’ or frenemies’ websites to get some ideas for content doesn’t mean that you can directly rip them off either.  If you create duplicate content or directly copy from a site like Wikipedia, you’ll only end up hurting in the long run.  Instead, use your own unique experiences, information, and worldview to create interesting, engaging text for your customers and prospects.  You may find that in the short term this requires more effort, but the future gains are well worth it.  You want to establish yourself as a go-to for information and become an authority in your niche.  You’ll most likely only do that if you have the orignial content to support you.
• Not all customers abroad are looking for the same information. This statement seems both completely wrong and entirely right, especially if you’re running a business.  You may offer the same products and services in Germany, China, and the US and think your customers are thus looking for the same information and website experience.  But they’re not.  Looking at your analytics will show you that often times customers in Germany are looking for product B while those in China want product A.  Use this information to focus your content around what’s most relevant and needed in your target areas.  You can also survey your customers in other regions to learn more about what they’re really looking for (and how they look for it too!).  There are always a myriad of social, political, economic, environmental and other factors that influence what people want to see on websites around the world.
• Translation. Translation into the most relevant language for a given website is key.  Learn more about good translation and your website to get a better idea of just how important this is for you.  Do your best to use real humans and engage in informed communication with your translator to avoid some of the potential pitfalls.

Keywords

Choosing appropriate keywords is important.  But after they’re chosen, how do you put them to the best use?

• Don’t stuff! A few years ago, throwing keywords all over a page willy-nilly was an effective way to boost your search engine rankings. But the search engines have gotten a lot smarter, and savvy internet users recognize deliberate keyword spamming when they see it.  Also, the supposed “keyword density” figures that people talk about aren’t what should be guiding you.  They’re useless figures.  Instead of focusing on arbitrary percentages, focus on well-written content.
• Use synonyms. This goes along with not stuffing keywords.  To keep your content interesting to visitors, avoid repetition of the same keyword over and over again.  Instead, use related words and phrases to enliven the text.  Search engines are also getting better at determining how words relate to one another and determining when one word means the same as another.
• Use only one, two, or a *very* small number of related keywords on any given page. Why should you reduce the number of keywords on a page to just one or two? So that you can better optimize for them of course! You’ll create more useful meta tags for a page if you only have to optimize for “blue widgets” instead of “blue widgets, green doohickeys, red doodads and yellow thingys.”  A very obvious point, but one that is easily overlooked.  You’ll also better alert both visitors and search engine spiders as to the content of the page.  You’ll appear in the appropriate search results, and visitors won’t wonder why they were sent to a page that doesn’t appear to talk about “blue widgets.”
• Plan your keywords for each geographic or language region you’re targeting. Do your keyword research so you know what search terms people use in Mexico as opposed to what they use in Spain.  There are other factors, like prepositions, accent marks, and different symbols that you should consider when people search as well.  You’ll more than likely have to adjust keywords on a language by language or region by region basis.  Most importantly, don’t forget to have your keywords translated! Don’t use English keywords, for example, on a site targeting Brazilian searchers.  You won’t be found if local search engines don’t think you’re very relevant to Brazil!

Obviously, your website’s content is the chief factor that will bring you high rankings unless you’re lucky enough to have high amounts of quality inbound links or are in possession of an “authority” website.  But many small business, B2B, and other brand new sites often don’t have these immediately.  That’s why a focus should be placed on what you provide and how you provide it.

Next up…organization, layout, and other factors that can affect your content optimization for international SEO.

Photo by 10ch on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 11:06 am and is filed under International Keyword Research, International SEO, Website Content, translation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.