That certain “Je ne SEO Pas”

11 takeaways from Multi-national Search Strategies presented by Iprospect:

I attended a webinar on Multi-national SEO and have filtered dow the key takeaways:
(All statistical source: ComScore)

1. 760 Million Searchers worldwide with 75% all searches originate outside of North America
2. Google Owns North America and Europe, Yahoo strong in Asia except China and South Korea
3. South Korea “Naver” is dominant like Google is dominant here. (Google a mere 4% South Korean market share)
4. Golden Triangle, eye-tracking, heat maps-more scattered-less triangular. note: Arabic + Asian languages read right to left.
5. Content Translation should happen after translated local keyword research is complete (in a perfect world SEO is always done first and site designed second.
6. Long Tail is longer in northern europe than mediterranean - Germanic, Slavic languages search using more terms in a query (long tail savy)and are more mature search markets than romance language countries. Implied: (Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians are search noobs using only one word to find “vino”)
7. NEW -Use Google webmaster tools to indicate which subdomains or folders are for which languages.
8. Avoid “choose your country” form submissions for entry pages (or any other form on homepage)
9. Incoming links to host country site should come from host country or host language.
a. E.g. The Brazilian site should have links coming from sites that are Brazilian.
b. (Unclear if they could just be Portuguese language or english language with a .br)
c. Presenter implied that local country links pass more PR juice to local site (could just be relevance, anyone have any experience with this please share)
10. Use PPC geo-targeting to target certain areas fairly cost effectively (compared to trying to rank naturally for foreign content.
11. Optimize for language and culture. Consider the meaning of color in webdesign; traditionally, Chinese brides wear red dresses.

I am working on a list of language specific keyword tools if anyone has any ideas please email me at timg@netconcepts.com