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.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 12:34 pm and is filed under International SEO, Website Content. 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.