Welcome back. There are some key principles to get clear on when it comes to global SEO. These relate to identifying your top priorities, doing keyword research in a global context, and aligning your website to an overall internationally aligned, and targeted web strategy. You'll learn about how to prioritize global web demands, why content initiatives and overall, online marketing strategy are important objectives to get in place, and you'll discover some of the key SEO principles to win on a global level. Our first principle is to start with your current languages and countries. Most likely, English is your primary language. Maybe you have a US or North America-based homepage, product pages or solution pages. As you consider expanding, take into account how you might modify your content for cultural fit for the regions and countries where you want to localize. Scaling global web development and global SEO is not for the faint of heart. It's hard to do it right. It requires an organization and executives prepared to support this vision. Ultimately, you need the right resources along with employing a high level of detail and thoroughness to get this step right. The second principle is, to be global, you must act locally. In order to have a consistent global presence, you need local flexibility for things like content, images, videos, and site layout. These will differ depending on the culture of the countries. You may need to vary how you communicate the brand. Market conditions might require you to emphasize certain elements of your brand or product differently in distinct local markets. Finally, corporate identity might need to flex to accommodate cultural differences. Just about every brand in play today, every major company has to account for cultural differences in the way they represent who they are, their values and what's important to them. The same holds true in a web format. Now, let's consider how to create an internationally targeted site. Should you specifically focus on country code top-level domains also known as ccTLDs, such as.co.uk for United Kingdom or.au for Australia or.jp for Japan, or should you keep everything on a single.com domain with country-level directories behind it? John Mueller of Google says that if your site has a geographic ccTLD such as.co.uk, Google will not additionally use the location of the server since that might be confusing. He says that using the country code top-level domain is generally a much stronger signal than the server's location. Therefore, if you have a ccTLD already in place, the server location is not as critical. However, I recommend you discuss this within your company or with your client to agree on whether you want to create a new country-specific domain extension each time you expand into a new country. You could purchase those for your brand and consider doing redirects, but consider what you gain by keeping all your content on a.com domain with directories like /au or /jp or /cn for those respective countries. Then weigh that against the specificity you'd get by keeping everything in the country and using ccTLDs. Your decision depends on the relative value you attribute to the additional parts of your website distinguished by country or language. Every global website must adhere to the standardized country and language naming conventions defined by the International Standards Organization or ISO. This includes anyone involved in globalization at any level. These two-letter codes represent each language and country. The first two letters stand for the language followed by another two-letter code for the country. For example, FR stands for French, but BE for Belgium, the country of Belgium. FR-CA stands for French in Canada or FR-FR for French in France. It's enough for you to know that you will need to incorporate these into your writing style and how you code URLs and content. You should also consider how best to set up your Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools for international targeting. Let's look specifically at Google. Go into the webmaster account. Then look under International Targeting for each relevant country where you are targeting users. Once you get the geo-targeting rules in place correctly in the Google Search Console, you gain greater assurance that Google will display your content and target users from that country. Link building remains one of the strongest ways to obtain favorable rankings, whether through outreach programs, guest blogging, social media or leveraging partnerships. Google is gathering additional signals on a website's regional relevance by noting the locations linking to it, aimed to associate your region-based content with links pointing to it from within that region. Search engines lender these higher importance and relevance. For example, a Chinese site with a large number of links coming from other China-based sites will have a stronger authority within local China search engines. This requires an added step that should only be considered after your base content and setup of country identifiers is in place. However, having quality links coming from within the region will usually be more beneficial than having links coming from other countries. If you have brick and mortar off-line locations, I recommend setting up a Google Places listing. When you submit this location information to Google Places, you claim ownership of the listings. You can optimize Google Places, pages using traditional SEO techniques. Then once the maps are created, embed them alongside your country's address information so that your company information displays for your main site. This is additional to leveraging schema.org tags that you might put in place for your content in certain countries.
