Recent discussions around the local café espresso machine have centered on the SEO value of a microsite.  It appears to be a divisive issue amongst SEOers and online strategists, even more so than the füßball table and the perennial argument of who lives in the Real World (SEOers) vs. who lives in the clouds (online strategists). So, let’s consider some of the reasons why one may venture down this thorny path and what the SEO implications may be… 

Firstly Wikipedia describes Microsites as “a web design term referring to an individual web page or cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. The microsite’s main landing page most likely has its own domain name or subdomain. This is also known as niche marketing.”

The main considerations with setting up a keyword rich mini-site, landing page or weblet as a microsite vs. building out your existing website are: 

1)                  When is a microsite a good commercial decision?

2)                  What are the SEO implications?

Microsites – a good commercial decision
Besides the obvious, “it depends”, in certain circumstances there are some quite compelling reasons to use a microsite strategy.

Here are 8 reasons why you might do so:

1.       It is easier to sell a product or a separate brand when they are hosted on their own domains.  SEO Benefit: Interlinking of microsites may help build link equity.

2.       Brand conflict issue; When the new product/service should be distanced from the main brand site.  Sometimes there are good commercial reasons to keep new online products or services separate from the main site where aligning your products may be detrimental to the main domain. SEO Benefit: Zero.

3.       It may be easier (and quicker) to bypass the legal and PR departments to build a small promotional site.  This is relevant when time based events dictate the immediacy and duration of opportunity, and where it is quicker to set up a new domain rather than receive formal approval from legal and PR departments. SEO Benefit: Creates opportunities to link to your main site.

4.       Content may be active or live for only a short duration ie for the life of the campaign or event. It may be easier (and quicker) to set up a microsite for specific campaigns, then redirect traffic back  to the main domain once the event is over. SEO Benefit: Keyword-rich, restricted content (niche sites) may drive traffic back to the main site.

5.       Where it is used as editorial support for a specific product. Sometimes it is not physically possible to add detailed information on the main domain. Useful for technical or in-depth descriptions of product or processes where more information may be useful for online research. SEO Benefit: Long tail keywords drive traffic back to the main site.

6.       Webmasters or bloggers may prefer to look at independent or informal sources for information gathering rather than corporate branded sites. SEO Benefit: Broader target audience with linking opportunities to send traffic to the main site.

7.       Viral sites can attract different visitors than the main branded websites. Messages will resonate with different audiences based on how they are received. SEO Benefit: Linking opportunities from different sources.

8.       They can lower your PPC cost because of the specific keyword focus which can improve the quality score and lower the CPC. SEO Benefit: Relevant keyword rich restricted content. “Owning the digital shelf” can help with organic click through rates.

However, the most obvious downfall of a microsite strategy is the increase in time and other resources it takes to manage each individual site.  This can lead to an exponential use of limited resources as the number of microsites grows.

Microsites may be frequently set up for the wrong reasons
Here are a few examples:

1.       Improved visibility or crowding out competitors on SERPs.  If there is no obvious benefit for the end-user, this tactic may be viewed as spam.

2.       When the sole or over-riding purpose is to generate self-given links back to a main site from microsites, then this practice may be viewed as spam.

3.       Creating keyword rich, limited content microsites in order to compete with broader content sites may provide a poor user experience and potentially result in a company’s web presence and branding collateral being diluted.

4.       A commonly held webmaster belief is that multiple niche sites linked together perform better than one broader content site.  This practice is not definitively true, as link equity is then spread across the microsites on multiple domains rather than passed directly to the main domain.

Ultimately, as Shakespeare might have said, if he were an SEO, implementing a microsite strategy may result in “suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, which is a good thing, or, if poorly executed, may result in “a sea of troubles”, which is a bad thing.  Weigh the pros and cons and tread carefully.

What do you think? 

We would love to hear your comments.

We’ve been keeping tabs on infographics ever since the linkbuilding tactic came about in 2008, blogged on it a few times and its something we encourage clients to do.

So, after reading David Scoville’s post on SEO.com I decided it was time to share my research on infographics. Over the last few months I’ve compiled over 60 infographics, categorised them by topic, recorded the amount of external links they’ve earned and noted how many times it got retweeted. Is it a fad? I think not. Does it work? It can be an exceptionally good linkbuilding tactic … as you will see in the data we’ve put together.

Check out the free data sheet shared on Google Docs which might help you figure out if this is worth doing in your niche:

And here’s some top tips for publishing an infographic

• Create some textual commentary around the infographic to give it some context.
• Keep the publication of infographic hosted on one place for maximum seo benefit because you want people to link to your site. So, never use Tinypic, Imgur or Flickr to host the JPG because people will link to it there instead of your website.
• Host the infographic on a webpage or within a blog post. Give the infographic some context on the blog post and link to the full size image. Here’s a good example from Focus FYI: blog post to do give the context and the full size image for display purposes.
• Give people share + bookmark functions to easily Retweet, Buzz and stumble it.
• Encourage people to embed it on their blogs by having the code on the page so that it can earn as many links as possible.
• If you have a really long vertical infographic (like this one) then you can try to fit the blog post width format.
• Display the sources on the infographic to show where the data came from.
• Encourage engagement on your blog by prompting people for their comments.

What is the best infographic you’ve ever seen? Do you think this medium is a fad?

There is a lot of talk in the traps about website page speed. Google (via Matt Cutts and Webmaster Tools) has openly stated that page speed will be a factor into the ranking algorithm for 2010 and will likely roll out with Caffeine – faster the better and you’ll be rewarded for it.

Google Webmaster tools have been reporting sample data from sites that have page speed issues (you can find this in the Labs section under Site Performance). Within Google Webmaster it also suggests the supplied Page Speed Firefox plug-in (installs as part of Firebug) should be used to get more accurate and full data. This has been available since July 2009 so I guess we have had plenty of notice. This is already in play for AdWords where page speed will affect your quality score.

This tools reports in the order of priorities – which things are slowing the pages the most and also gives a suggested size savings if recommendations are carried out and, I mean, recommendations. It tells you specifically what files are problematic, which images should be attended to, which JavaScript files can be combined, which CSS definitions (within an include file) aren’t being used and can be excluded, DNS look-ups, browser caching and more.

Google introduced this idea of page speed officially in their blog in June 2009.

Not surprisingly it has been written up on many sites. Webpronews covered this in November 2009.

The goal here is to make the internet faster and improve the user experience. In turn, it is very likely that this will also improve traffic and conversions. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you’re serious about wanting your site to perform better in search engines, and you haven’t given much thought to load times and such, it’s time to readjust your way of thinking.”

Of course there is going to be debate about this within the industry, with marketers and developers. It’s just a new little layer to make our jobs a little more challenging.

At this stage the Caffeine update has yet to roll out. The last update Matt Cutts posted can be found here: Expect Caffeine after the holidays.

Here are some other sites to read up on this:

Google Page Speed Report Comes to Webmaster Tools
Site Speed Google’s Next Ranking Factor
Google Wants the Web to Function like a Magazine
WebPerformance Best Practices
Should Web Page Speed Influence Google PageRank?

Over the past couple of weeks, while I’ve been researching Search related stats and Social Media information; I have come across some ultra-cool Infographics that explain the most complicated scenarios through the use of visual mediums – usually these are images and videos.

Hence, the cliche of “a picture speaks a thousand words” is definitely true in this case, especially in the world of Search and Social Media. So I decided to share some of these cool Infographics with you and to show how powerful they can be for SEO.

This was definitely at the top of my list for the best Infographics. The whole idea of simplifying an incredibly complex situation such as the credit crunch was illustrated incredibly well. Not only did this allow people to understand what really happened with the current credit crisis, but the use of pictures, and a well deployed Vimeo video, helped create a viral marketing spin on the whole thing. From an SEO perspective, the hub website, www.crisisofcredit.com, gained more than 18,500 links within 8 months and the Vimeo video gained 2.1 million views. In addition, iIf you also look at the SERPs for “the crisis of credit”, you’ll see that the 6 out of 10 results are all surrounding this original infographic, which is a great example of dominating the search engine results.

The next on my list of favourite infographics, is the image below.

This image metaphorically illustrates the complex world of social media that creates a busy city of communities, such as Youtube, Google, Digg and so forth. The original image was created by eBoy; but this image has been used by many other bloggers to visualise the essence of Social Media.

The third infographic which stood out of the crowd was the “If You Printed The Internet” image, as seen below. This is a simple, yet logical way to demonstrate the immense growth of the Internet. Looking at the blog post through the eyes of SEO, this innovative image is a creative way to gain links naturally. To prove its effectiveness, the image has over 175,000 links since the post was created.

Let’s move on to some more complex diagrams that have been successful from a linking building perspective. The next image on the list of cool infographics is Left vs Right World. It looks quite detailed and discusses the Left & Right parties of Government in regards to their regulations. I guess if we were to put this image into legal jargon, it would be near impossible for the general public to understand.. Beyond it’s intricate detail, this image alone has gained over 30,000 links over a span of 2 months. This just shows the effectiveness of link baiting strategies that use visual aids such as infographics.

The image below takes a more scientific visualisation of how people utilise their day with various activities. The great thing about this Flash image is that you can manipulate the different factors to see how the daily routine changes for different demographics. The New York Times also gained over 500 links for this post.

Well the next image is something that most people can relate to, coffee. Everyone likes their coffee made differently; hence there are so many types to choose from, such as Latte, Cappuccino, Flat White and Macchiato. Well the image below shows how some of these coffee types are made and how to articulate their names. It seemed appropriate to bring this image up, not only for its clever use of imagery, but also to show how a simple concept can generate so much interest. The blog post and infographic gained 408 comments over 2 months and 50,000 links to the whole blog site.

Finally, the last of the infographics that made my short list was the “Billion Dollar Gram”. The image is blatantly obvious; it’s trying to show how the economy spends, earns, gives and tightens its liquidity. I personally would say this is not the prettiest of infographics, but definitely gets the point across through one picture.

In conclusion, the above set of infographic examples are only some of many that I happened to come across. It appears more and more common for bloggers and social networks to use images and videos to explain either a simple or complex concept. Not only do these images seem a lot more pleasant to the eye, they also have a lot of traction to gain links and user generated feedback. This natural link building exercise plays an important role in SEO to help build relevant links back to the hub website and improve the visibility of the brand. This is something to then consider for a lot of brands.

It was announced by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) this week that International Domain Names (IDNs) are to be made available by early to mid 2010. IDNs will allow for registration of domain names that do not use the latin alphabet, instead using local language characters, for example Chinese or Arabic. ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush described the new system as “the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago”.

Some countries, such as China and Thailand, have already introduced workarounds that allow computer users to enter web addresses in their own language. However, these were not internationally approved and do not work on all computers. Support for 100,000 international characters would make traditional keyboards insufficient input devices for accessing the entire Internet.

The impact of this change on the SEO industry has the potential to be significantly concerning, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. The change shouldn’t affect search campaigns where a site owner is solely interested in Australian traffic, however it may add an extra layer of complexity to strategies if a website is trying to capture traffic from the countries that end up embracing IDNs.

One of the most talked about concerns with IDNs is the new angle that will be made available to scammers and fraudsters. Phishing is a form of Internet fraud that aims to steal valuable information such as credit cards, social security numbers, user IDs and passwords from unsuspecting internet users. Anti-Phishing Working Group reported this month that non-Latin characters could help phishers spoof legitimate websites with similar characters. For example, a phishing website set up to mimic the online payment website paypal.com could use a Cyrillic “a” instead of an ASCII “a,” making it a technically different web address but similar enough to fool users. So far at least, phishers have not been using such tricks at a high frequency, but the proliferation of new international web addresses could present the opportunity. Site security factors heavily in search engine ranking algorithms, and this may become an even more important factor as malware injections become more feasible.

The ICANN has stated on their website that ccTLDs (country code top level domains eg. com.au for Australia) will be available to the governments of countries who wish to use languages based on scripts other than Latin. This is significant as it’s generally agreed that having a local ccTLD will have a positive impact in search engine rankings in that country.

In order to attain strong rankings in a particular region, not only is it important that your content targets that region in the correct language, but also link building strategies should be conducted in the target language. It is likely that this change will cause the internet to become more highly segregated, and websites utilising new IDNs will not (initially at least) have as many natural linking sources as other latin-character based websites.

Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics are two great resources for webmasters to track diagnostic issues and monitor user activity on your site, but whether Google opens their services up to non-latin character based websites remains to be seen.

We would love to hear others thoughts on this change – how do you feel it will impact on search, or the web in general?

Resources:
http://www.icann.org
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://searchengineland.com
http://www.ethioplanet.com
http://www.internetnews.com

Over the last few days it was announced that Google will be making changes to its algorithm; a sizable modification which we may have not seen since the likes of Big Daddy and Jagger’s 1-3 in 2006.

Google has stated:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet, so we’d welcome feedback on any issues you see.”

Whilst Matt Cutts claims that most of the change will be on infrastructure, we may see some changes in the search results.

It is certainly an unexpected move from Google, which generally does not give the general public this type of insight, let alone coining a term for it before anyone else does. If you want to see a preview of this work in progress you can here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com

As for searches you will see a reordering of results, however, the change is purported to make searching faster and more accurate – more real-time. As usual Google is not revealing what exactly has been altered. Google have opted to make this change in beta for users to test, calling it a developer’s preview.

Users, as you would imagine, have already begun testing. Mashable has done this and published their results:

- Results did return faster and in some cases doubling the speed at which results are returned
- It does seem that some elements of blended search are further down in the page which could mean that not all elements have been implemented in Caffeine. Mashable even speculate that user activity on some sites may have pushed them higher in the results
- The new results do seem more relevant in some cases and it appears that it could be tightly tied with keywords
- Index size is also increased

In my testing I found that indeed the changes to the pages are not hugely significant. Doing a vanity search the first thing I noticed was that social media sites were more prominent. This may tie in with the result above that user activity may play a role in rankings.

So, what does this mean for SEO?

At the moment it simply means that we must be ready when this change rolls out. Will results have a heavier focus on keywords and user activity? If all elements of blended search are included in Caffeine then it would appear that universal results are being pushed down.

Obviously, as Google has put this out for testing, the end results will likely be very different than the current speculation of changes we are seeing at present.

As Tom Krazit stated on CNET:

“That’s not necessarily indicative of how the results would be presented, once Caffeine goes live, but it is evidence that the update will require those dependent on Google to drive traffic to their sites to study the changes. For now, Google is not sharing many details regarding how it reworked its back-end architecture and indexing process with Caffeine.”

It is still early days – so watch this space.

Further references can be found here:
Google’s New Search Index
Google Caffeine Tests

Small business’s need to establish trust in the online community. Consumers may not know who you are – you need to ensure you’re ranking well and also offering a trustworthy product from a trustworthy source. This trust can be established through factors including the TLD component of a domain (i.e. “.com.au”) for the website which shows your business is Australian, as well as the inclusion of information such as addresses, phone numbers, and an ABN number.

Trust is just one tiny aspect of the actual user experience. How are you actually going to get the visitors to your site in the first place?

Keyword Research:

Big brands have the luxury of getting traffic from people searching for the brand. Small businesses will often not enjoy the same luxuries, which means highly targeted, relevant keywords are essential.

Some important questions to ask yourself when looking at keywords:

• Are my keywords actually being searched on? – There’s no point optimising your site for “Sydney florist” if more people are searching for “buy flowers in Sydney”.
• What phase of the buying cycle do my keywords target? – If none of your keywords target people in the actual purchasing phase how can you expect keywords to convert?
• Am I capturing people in the discovery, as well as purchasing phase, for that extra brand awareness? Remember that the more often a customer sees your brand, the more authority and trust they will give it.

Perform keyword research to make sure the terms you’re targeting are correct. Narrow these down to around 5 primary keywords at the most for a small site and ensure one primary keyword is targeted per page.

Content is King and So are Links:

Excellent content will help with search engine rankings, and it will help keep customers on your site. Building relevant links to important content will go a long way towards increasing the relevance for both the content and the primary keywords that this content is targeting!

Google Local Business Center:

Enter your business into Google Local Business Center. It’s free and will help people find both your site, and your physical business address!

Some quick tips for Google Local Business Center Rankings:

• Ensure your businesses physical address is on every page throughout the site
• Add your phone number to each page throughout the website
• Fill in your products and services using the keyword research that has been done
• Get customers to review your site! With a good product AND good service this won’t be hard!
• There’s the ability to add photos and videos of your business – use these! Again it’s about making it easy for people to FIND you.
• Get listed on local directories such as TrueLocal and LocalStore. Not only will these help with Google Local Business Listing by adding relevance to your listing, TrueLocal results make up Yahoo Local Business Listings.

Directories are Still Important:

Get listed in core directories such as HotFrog and depending on your industry, Ferret. These directories often rank highly in the search engine results pages, which can deliver referral traffic while you’re working on rankings for your own site.

Google Adwords:

Adwords can help you get traffic and conversions, particularly while you’re building up rankings for your primary keywords. Not sure how to use Adwords or can’t justify the cost? Keep an eye out for the $50 vouchers that Google sometimes gives out. They can help you get your feet wet, and give you an idea of the power of Pay Per Click advertising.

Get Social:

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, plus many more. Some are popular with everyone, others simply appeal to a niche, target audience. Do you have a presence on these, and if not why not?

The joy of small businesses on many social platforms is that you won’t necessarily come under the scrutiny that the big brands do so mistakes, if made, won’t necessarily have as big an impact. Just make sure you offer something of value to your customers. Can’t think of what that might be? Talk to your customers and LISTEN to what they say.

If your content is awesome (and I don’t mean awesome like you sell a nicely coloured red widget, I mean awesome like other people will want to share it), add share buttons to the site. Make that content easy to share. The more people that share it, the more your brand will get out there, and the more people will hopefully buy your product and increase your return on investment (ROI).

Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is one of the most robust free reporting tools out there, and it’s completely free. Get it on the site even if you don’t know how to use it. This transparency over your traffic will give you great insights both now, and later down the track.

The internet is coming down with video content. To give you some idea of the scale, in January 2009 YouTube alone had six billion videos viewed.

Of those six billions views you might have already seen the home grown videos such as the “Charlie bit my finger” 109 million views, “Battle at Kruger” 45 million views, “David After Dentist” 25 million views , “Star Wars Kid” 13.5 million views, “Beached as” nearly 5 millions views. And, who could forget the entertaining Sparta the Mean Kitty who’s video has been viewed 25 million views and counting.

Now of course, there is another breed of video content, the sort that originates from advertising agencies and corporate offices and has defined commercial intent. Brands are increasingly using it for marketing brand messages, promoting services, educating consumers and establishing a presence online oftentimes entertaining their consumers (and potential consumers).

But can there be some SEO payoff for a brand entering social media with video? Can a brand publish a video online, get the desired exposure and improve performance in organic search? The answer is yes and here are some other recent examples of videos that have truly gone ‘viral’ and done well for the brand behind it:

Dove Evolution of Beauty

One of the most notable videos to come from any brand was Dove’s Evolution video which was part of a campaign by Dove in 2006. By striking a chord with female viewers the video showed how model’s beauty is often artificial but with a little Photoshop magic, Dove turned an ordinary women into an airbrushed beauty. Dove’s angle is an honest approach to beauty and has been rewarded with well over 9 million views, 9,219 ratings and 4,241 comments. What’s more, the original video has spawned 100’s of clones, remakes, and parodies. And what about the SEO payoff? The video page on YouTube has 8,823 links. Unfortunately, those links benefit YouTube and not Dove’s websites.

Evian Skating Babies

No doubt Evian saw the huge amount of views that baby videos were getting, such as “this laughing baby” and “Charlie bit my finger” and then realised that there was an opportunity produce something creative. So far, Evian’s Skating Babies original video has had over 8 million views. The website promoted on the video Evian Live Young has a growing portfolio of precious links.

The Crisis of Credit Visualization

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Jonathan Jarvis made an impressive video making simple the complex story of the US credit crisis for his thesis work for the Media Design Program. Over the span of 5 months the video has got 1.9 million views on Vimeo and another 1 million views on YouTube. What’s more, the main Crisis Of Credit website, has amassed a powerful portfolio of 21,000+ links.

Compare the Meerkat

What have meerkats and car insurance got in common? Nothing in particular. However, that didn’t stop one UK-based car insurance comparison site from making a connection. Launched at the beginning of this year, the videos play on the similarity between the name of the website “Compare the Market” and the Russian pronunciation of the name by loveable meerkat, Aleksandr Orlov. How successful was it? There are five original videos on YouTube now with combined views of 257,000+. The Compare the Meerkat website was nominated for a webby and has amassed over 11,000 links meanwhile the main website now has close to 40k links. On the social front, Compare the Market now have a powerful brand mascot if the 491,866 of Aleksandr’s Facebook fans are anything to go by then.

Computer Tan

Computer Tan was launched back in February to appeal to sun-starved Brits who want to “look great in the office” by using new desktop tanning technology. Ridiculous as it sounds, quite a few pale poms were fooled momentarily because of course the website & iPhone app is an elaborate hoax, a hoax with a serious message about the dangers of skin cancer. The charity behind the campaign, Karen Clifford Skin Cancer Charity Skcin, skillfully combined humour, hoax and skin cancer with video to score over 1 million visitors , 125,000 YouTube views. Breit Bart’s story about it was popular on Digg with 1720 diggs. And the SEO payoff? Thousands of links to ComputerTan.com and Skcin.org from blogs and authority websites including BBC.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk.

Managers do well to consider worst case scenarios and SEO consultants dread the consequences. Of all the damaging things that can happen, here are 10 of the worst things that can happen to your website, all of which are coming from a search point of view.  Some of these scenarios are completely self-inflicted and therefore totally avoidable. The other scenarios leave your website mostly at the mercy of outsiders.

#1 Exclude The Search Engines!

The humble robots.txt file is such a simple little file and it is so often ignored. Its an effective and easy to implement file that can be used to stop bad bots from crawling a site. It is also used for disallowing the good ‘bots’ from spidering folders and files that you don’t want to have in the SERP’s, such as sensitive documents or the cgi-bin.  However, be careful not to exclude to Googlebot, Yahoo! Slurp or Live’s MSNbot.  How easy would this be? The following two lines of code is all it takes to tell Google, “Thanks for visiting but do not come into this website or include any pages into your index“:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

#2 Exclude The Search Engines (Take Two)

Similar to the first point, by adding a “Meta NoIndex” to the header of a webpage will signal the search engines to not index that page.  If a page is not indexed, it cannot rank for any keywords.  If it does not rank in the search engines then it won’t receive any search traffic. This has happened to a number websites where a “Meta NoIndex” has mistakenly been applied to important pages and its one mistake to avoid, especially when websites are coming out of the development stage.

#3 Website Spidered During Redesign

Most web designers implement redesigns by working on a staging server first before launching the new website in the launch phase. Other web designers have been known to implement major ‘dev’ changes live on site.  Needless to say, it could be slightly embarassing and somewhat of a SEO setback to either have a half-finished website spidered during a redesign or have the entire staging server spidered and included into the search engine ranking pages.

#4 Website Suffers Hacker Attack

There are several reasons why hackers attack websites, the first of which is pure vandalism by leaving a malicious message on the site. The second reason has to do with money, in the case of ecommerce websites hackers will want to get access to your website in order to steal your revenue.  A third reason is to install some form of badware on your site, software that when downloaded by the visitor, will fundamentally disregard their choice regarding their computer will be used. The fourth reason is to drain your website’s search engine equity by planting links to dodgy sites on your website.

Furthermore, if a website is comprised by hackers and it goes unoticed, the search engines could crawl the website while in the interim period and place a “This site may harm your computer” warning message in the SERPs.  If this occurs rankings and traffic will plunge dramatically and it can take weeks for the traffic to recover after the problem has been fixed and a reinclusion request is made.

#5 Hosting Outages

Asides from visitors not being able to access your website when its down (and all the associated losses in traffic and revenue), have you considered the implications for your SEO and SEM campaigns? From the SEO point of view, search engines won’t be able to spider your latest content and may even penalise websites if their bots try to visit when it’s experiencing server problems.  In terms of SEM, any paid search campaign will be referring traffic to a landing page that is down. This is obviously a waste in paid search budget as well as it negatively effecting the CPC and quality score.

#6 Target Vanity Keywords

Sometimes in our quest for more traffic we go after keywords that we think will bring in hoardes of visitors to a website when in actual fact, nobody really searches for those keywords. Similarily, sometimes websites neglect to pursue keywords that are known to convert better. Hence, there is an importance of solid keyword research to not only find out what people are searching for but what words they use in that search. Not only is this true in organic search, but also paid search campaigns where budgets get depleted by paying for keywords which have no relevance to the target website.

#7 Domain Squatting

Think of domain names as Internet real estate. Would you allow people or companies to own your main marketing slogans or brand terms? And for the price of a decent bottle of wine you can put your brand name (CCTLD) beyond the reach of domain squatters.

#8 Duplicate Content

Sometimes website content can get duplicated on a website unintentionally. Duplicate content is defined as multiple webpages that largely have identical content.  For example, an ecommerce store might offer visitors printer-only versions of product pages across a whole catalogue of products. In so doing, a website with 5,000 products could easily become a 10,000 page website with 1000’s of identicals. For SEO, this means that the overall ability of the website to rank well for keywords and phrases is greatly impeded. To use an illustration, by bloating a website with duplicate content its like driving a tank instead of a high performance car!

#9 Website Cloaking

Showing users one website/page meanwhile presenting the search engines completely different content is defined as ‘cloaking’. The term is probably derived from the Klingons in Star Trek and historically has been a ‘black hat’ tactic used to effectively deceive the search engines into ranking a website much better than it otherwise would.  Less sophicated versions of cloaking involve using white text hidden against a white background or positioning content off screen where it cannot be seen by a visitor. Interestingly, more than a few brands have had their fingers burned by trying to ‘game’ Google using this tactic.

#10 Ignore SEO Basics

Forget about cloaking and hacking, by far the most common thing that impairs a website from ranking well is simply to ignore SEO best practice. By ignoring the implementation of metadata, website archecture, properly coded HTML and link building a website will struggle to achieve the visibility and search engine rankings it would otherwise reach.

I have worked on sites for multi-national clients targeting different regions and languages. The first question that always arises is “what is going to be the best way to localise my site?”

Everyone – this is a loaded question!

My answer is: get a ccTLD (country code top level domain such as .au) and/or have the site hosted in the country that it is targeting. Simple, right?

OK – this blog post is now complete…….

Oh, but wait, I did say it was a loaded question and it truly is because it is rarely that simple. This post hopes to cover off a fair few situations.

There are a number of ways, or indicators, that tell search engines what your target region is. The top two are:

1. Domain choice

2. Location of host

There are a number of ways to present regionalised sites to users aside from the domain/hosting scenario.

The key is to make the best choice for your business and do all the right things where you can, so the engines know what your intent is. What if the site is broken into sub-domains or is using folders to split out regionalised content and languages?

3. Language

I find that non-English speaking sites have a leg up due to the character encoding. If the site is written in German, then the target is Germany. Alas, that doesn’t always work either. If your site is written in French is that targeting France or French-Canadians?

4. Local Business Listings

5. Regionalised footer

Next would be local information. Use accounts in Google and optimise the listings in Google’s Business Centre and fill out as much information as you can, from addresses to opening times, and select the appropriate keyword categories.

Ensure you put local addresses and contact details on the pages of the site. The footer is usually ideal as this appears on every page of the site.

6. Inbound links

Another great indicator for the engines is inbound links, primarily links from sites in the same region. If a good number of Australian sites are pointing to yours, the engines make assumptions about your target region. This can work if you don’t have a ccTLD or hosting in the target country as an alternative strategy, but we all know how hard link building can be.

7. Google Webmaster

Google Webmaster Tools has the ability to set the location of site sections to help them understand the site’s geographic target. I wouldn’t wholly rely on this because it’s fallible and pretty reliant on your site’s architecture. That, and not all countries have an 80% Google market share, so addressing it with Google only will leave other engines to falter.

Now to tackle sub-domains and folders; there are pros and cons to this as well as the choice of a ccTLD.

Scenario 1

International site with ccTLDs hosted in Finland (or in target country)

Each site will factor in local search due to the choice of ccTLD. This is good for local search but is a management nightmare. Who’s responsible for content, global and locally? Is there duplication of said content and will this be a problem?

Pro – Localisation is much easier

Con – Each site has its own SEO equity and will have to build on this individually

Scenario 2

Global site with sub-directories, no ccTLDs and hosted in the US

This is a large site with a folder structure such as /australia or /au or something similar. There are still the same issues around content management. What about the affect of duplication of content on the same site? A product page for /au, /us, /uk etc…..

How are the engines to know what region this content belongs to?

Pro – This is a large, fresh site with lots of content. Site equity belongs to the one domain so off-site strategies will affect all regions

Con – Localisation can be difficult

Scenario 3

Global site with sub-domains, no ccTLDs and hosted in Finland

This is not much different than using sub-directories. While sub-domains will be seen as related to the parent site, they are still individual sites.

Pro – May be easier to handle language and localisation by segregation uk.mydomain.com, au.mydomain.com

Con – Each site has its own SEO equity and will have to build on this individually

So, what else can you do to help the engines along, particularly with Scenario #2 and #3?

8. Use UTF-8 Character Encoding

9. Ensure all domain redirects are handled appropriately. For instance:

www.mydomain.com.au–> 301 –> www.mydomain.com/australia/

10. Use the HTML or XHTML lang tag to specify the pages’ language en-au, en-us, en-gb

11. The use of keywords in the URL /en-au/ may be less understood than /australia/

There is really no perfect fit and a multi-domain strategy should be well thought out for any international SEO Campaign.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…