For the past few years people have been optimising the website of the company I work for, for search engines and
(of course) for customers. This has been done by improving the W3C compliance and
by removing all mistakes that were in the website.
The website is available in four different languages. In my country the website
is doing very well in Google. On almost any related word I’m searching for,
my website is on the first page. So most work is done.
What I’m wondering is: how can I increase the findability for foreign countries?
Foreign countries are: the United Kingdom, United States, France etc.
I’ve done quite some research but I can’t really find a proper answer.
It would be great if you guys could throw me some ideas.
About the flags for each country, that’s already on the website. We have four different languages and they are being optimized as we speak. I’ts just that when I do my weekly keyword check I see that other sites that are on the first page of the results aren’t so good.
I have the feeling something else is going on.
Also, when I run a test, it tells me that Google only shows 43 links to the website. When I do another check I can see it’s more than 1.070 links pointing to the website. On Yahoo it displays correctly though (1.443 links).
Would it be helpfull to place the site in (free) directories in the USA?
If you are optimizing web site for the different countries and languages you’d better have subdomain names like en.domainname.comesp.domainnam.com, fr.domainname.com etc. That would the pages from the same web site but each has own language.
Maybe you can have a little flag for each country. Each flag would direct them to their country website, of which will have different content specific to that country. This country website will contain the countries .TLD and will be hosted within that region too. By doing so Google will treat the web-page is a national webpage. In theory this should give you more exposure internationally, or nationally as Google believes.
Perhaps you should put relevance in your content to those foreign countries? i.e. mailing address for that country, or We Ship to country name. I have a similar challenge being in Canada, and getting discovered on Google.com as opposed to .ca. Google.com may only be looking for relevant results for U.S. viewers. This tip was passed on to be by someone extremely successful in SEO. It made sense to me.