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:

English
Chinese
Spanish
Japanese
French
German
Arabic
Portugese
Korean
Italian

And the top search engines are:

Google
Yahoo!
Baidu (China)
MSN
NHN [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The global financial crunch (or crisis if you prefer) is hard to ignore at the moment, and there are certainly many people and governments scrambling to protect their investments and financial industries. At home, people are cutting back on their expenses and doing what they can to weather these uncertain economic times. You [...]