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!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 2:15 pm and is filed under International SEO. 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.