If you’re a global brand, one website does not serve all. Prominent brands with international footprints need websites that match the attitudes and desires of the target audiences in each and every country, region, and language they do business in.

And that can get complicated. Here’s why.

Typically speaking, a brand will have a dot-com branded website designed for doing business domestically. To target additional countries, you can either add sub-domains or subdirectories to your dot-com site to target additional countries, or you can use additional country-code Top Level Domains (ccTLD) to target countries outside of the U.S. like example.de, signals to search engines that a website is designed for an audience in Germany.

But there’s more to international SEO than just using a ccTLD.

Influencing the other major factors that search engines use to determine relevancy in country-targeted search engines is critical to establishing first page visibility.

The major cues major search engines look at are:

-  Where the site is hosted: Websites perform best for natural search when they are hosted in the country they are targeting. Depending on the size and scale of a company, this approach is not always feasible.

-  Links pointing at the site: Are the majority of links to this site coming from other websites relevant to Germany? Or are the majority of links from countries outside of Germany using anchor-text in English?

-  What language is used on the website? The language that the copy is written in and tags such xml: lang tags signal to search engines that the content is designed for a German audience.

-  Local address information: Including the local address in the footer on every page of the site provides additional information: city, postal code, phone number that search engines can use to make the connection between a domain and a country.

- Google Webmaster Tools geo-targeting setting: If a site is using a generic TLD, like a dot-com, setting the geo-targeting to inform Google that the site is targeting Germany is recommended.

Developing a successful international SEO strategy begins with using one of two approaches depending on an organization’s resources and requirements.

The first approach, designed mainly for a site that has strong local presence and a weaker main domain, involves creating a ccTLD for the targeted country, and using the local teams to develop in-language content for that website. This approach works best if the company has a smaller footprint or a simple product offering.

The domain structure for this type of strategy would involve a dot-com site for targeting the U.S. plus a ccTLD for each of the countries that are being marketed to outside of the U.S. This approach allows for each domain to be set up in Google Webmaster Tools.

Global brands with robust product offerings and larger footprints require a different approach. These types of organizations often have a strong centralized marketing department and a main domain that established a lot of trust with search engines. To target additional countries, adding a sub-domain (de.website.com) or sub-directory (www.example.com/de) are added to the website. The use of sub-domains is preferable because it allows for the content targeting a specific country to be hosted locally. Either setup allows the site to be set up in Google Webmaster Tools.

A random sample of ten well-respected global brands found that three of the companies had a website hosted in at least one of the countries they are targeting. Here’s a list of global brands, the country they are targeting, the URL of the homepage and where the site is hosted:

-  HP (Germany): http://welcome.hp.com/country/de/de/welcome.html#Product –  hosted in the US

-  Microsoft (France): http://www.microsoft.fr –  hosted in the US

-  IBM (Italy): http://www.ibm.com/it/it/ –  hosted in the US

-  GE (U.K.): http://www.ge.com/uk –  hosted in the US

-  Nokia (Mexico): http://www.nokia.com.mx –  hosted in the US

-  Toyota (Brazil): http://www.toyota.com.br –  hosted in Japan

-  Intel (Italy): http://www.intel.com/index.htm#/it_IT_01 –  hosted in the US

-  McDonald’s (Germany):  http://www.mcdonalds.de –  hosted in Germany

-  Disney (France): http://www.disney.fr –  hosted in the US

-  Mercedes-Benz (Brazil): http://www.mercedes-benz.com.br –  hosted in Brazil

The list above demonstrates that local hosting isn’t the norm, nor is it necessary for the world’s leading brands, as leveraging other ranking factors can help overcome any sites that are hosted outside of their target country. Improving the link profile of country-targeted content can go a long way toward overcoming any lack of local hosting.

It’s important to note that there is no one size fits all solution for international SEO. What works for one brand may not be applicable for another due to technical issues or organization structure. However, any changes to a company’s global online footprint — switching from ccTLDs to a global portal with countries listed in sub-directories for example — should be strongly analyzed before any decisions are made.

Last but not least, there is often a strong likelihood of duplicate content when a brand has the need for targeting several countries that share the same language. Any international SEO strategy needs to include how to best mitigate duplicate content between websites targeting the US and UK or Spain and Mexico for example, which is another blog post on its own, but worth mentioning here.

Seth Nickerson is a Senior Search Strategist at iCrossing.

This cannot be overstated: all redirects (read: seriously, all) should be made via 301 permanent redirects, as 302 temporary redirects have no place in this task. The 301s will ensure all link building history and strength is passed on to the new page. 302s do not carry over this search visibility necessity.

It is crucial that the website team spend the time to map out which URLs are going away, and where they should be directed. Do not sit on the plan. Prepare your battle plan a few weeks prior to relaunch (or when the final sitemap is determined), then implement the redirects on the day or evening the site is pushed out of production into the live web environment.

While all pages will be reviewed for redirect pointing, it is a good idea to look at the URLs that are getting natural search traffic. You can simply sort Top Entry URLs by the amount of incoming natural search traffic. This tip helps to prioritize your redirect strategy.

It may take between 24-48 hours for the redirects to propagate across the Internet worldwide, so be patient. If, by the third day post-launch, you are still seeing a handful of pages failing to redirect, those specific redirects should be implemented again.

Mapping page redirects is not difficult, but it does take patience. Retrofitting these redirects post-launch creates headaches for both you and your users, so be sure to build this task into your pre-launch scheduling.

There are two types of redesign situations. The first is the less complex of the two, and it is when the redesign does not involve a new domain name. The details of how to complete this process include:

1.  Create a spreadsheet listing all website pages in the first column.

2.  Make a first-pass through the list, while comparing current pages with the staging server environment your upcoming site. Copy the page URL over to the second column for all pages that will not change during the changeover.

3.  Make a second pass addressing all pages that either will be in a new location on the site or will be removed. Begin by typing in the new URL for all pages changing location in the site. Next, determine the most relevant new page that best matches what a user would expect to find when visiting from a search engine listing. If a direct relationship does not exist in the new site, the best practice is to move one level “up” in the site and make the redirect point to that page (e.g., from a product page to a sub-category page, from a sub-category page to a category-level page). For pages with no relevant upper-level category, the best practice is to either redirect to either the home page or site map.

The second situation involves migration from one domain name to another one. The details of how to complete this process include:

1.  Create a spreadsheet listing all website pages in the first column.

2.  Make a first-pass through the list, while comparing current pages with the staging server environment your upcoming site. Copy the page URL over to the second column for all pages that will not change during the changeover. Then, perform a Find and Replace” and switch all mentions of www.olddomainname.com to www.newdomainname.com.

3.  Then, just as above, make a second pass addressing all pages that either will be in a new location on the site or will be removed. Complete the task with the methodology used in the first situation.

In addition to mapping URLs page-by-page, it is also an excellent idea to set a wild card 301 to throw a wide net of sorts that will catch any rogue, old URLs floating around in cyberspace.

Pages can be missed, especially with large sites. You will not be the first to person to do this if it happens to you. Therefore, another strong idea is to monitor the activity of your custom 404 page after launch to see how you did. This is the best way to track your work post-launch.

The process of URL mapping helps to successfully transition the important element of search equity from the old site to the new one. Therefore, the site owner definitively benefits from setting up and implementing a comprehensive redirection plan.

Michael Herman is a Search Strategist at iCrossing.

The search giant announced January 19th that it is changing the way synonyms are displayed in SERP snippets – by bolding not just search terms, but the synonyms, as well.

“Historically, we have bolded synonyms such as stemming variants – like the word “picture” for a search with the word “pictures.” Now, we’ve extended this to words that our algorithms very confidently think mean the same thing, even if they are spelled nothing like the original term. This helps you to understand why that result is shown, especially if it doesn’t contain your original search term.”

Figure 1 – The term “photos” is bolded, even though the original search term is “pictures”

Figure 2 – The term “blackberry” is bolded, even though the original search term is “bb”

The change comes after Google’s recent self-analysis of the impact and quality of its synonyms system, which was developed after 5+ years of research. According to the company:

- Synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports
- Synonyms significantly improve search results
- Only one “bad” synonym existed for every 50 queries

While it’s not perfect, Google points out that its system is intuitive enough to know the difference between, for example, “arm reduction” vs. “arms reduction.” After all, no one wants to see flabby arms when searching for information about reducing stockpiles of weaponry, and vice versa.

While the use of synonyms may not be the most intimidating tool in the arsenal of SEO weapons, it’s yet another way to establish relevancy and increase your chances of making content visible to a targeted audience. Perhaps the simple act of adding synonyms to the content, in addition to utilizing existing SEO best practices, can make it even more visible.

Beth Fox is a Senior NSO Copywriter at iCrossing.

This educational process was most recently executed during the website redesign of Hyundai.com – and all to great success. Of course, the earlier your web development team starts talking about search, the more successful the outcome will be.

If you’re looking for ways to incorporate search education into your web design practices, try these suggestions:

Start by educating your team on the value of SEO. Make them want to learn about it, especially the project managers who can/will budget time for SEO once they understand the value. Use figures like estimated ROI to really make your point; for example, one of our travel and hospitality clients earned more than $26,000 last month from just one non-branded keyword through natural search. Offer additional case studies or even some cautionary tales of sites that failed when SEO was ignored. This will motivate team members to educate themselves and ask more questions along the way. Be sure to answer WIIFM – “What’s in it for Me?” – for each member on the team.

Discuss the SEO strengths of your current website during the project kick-off. Take this opportunity to speak about what your current site does well from an SEO standpoint, such as how many natural search visitors your site currently gets, what pages or content areas get the most traffic and, most importantly, how much revenue is driven through natural search. A redesign can pose a risk to any existing natural search revenue streams, so reviewing what is at stake will help your team understand which design aspects to maintain where there may be areas for improvement.

Create and distribute a PowerPoint deck or handout offering an overview of SEO. E-mail it to everyone on the team during the early stages of the project. As the project progresses, create additional handouts that can help inform specific team members on SEO-friendly practices specifically related to their areas of expertise. SEOmoz has an excellent example of a SEO Cheatsheet for Web Developers.

Integrate more advanced SEO training into each phase of the project. Ask team members to research SEO best practices for that phase and present their finding to the group. The presentation should then be followed by a team discussion (moderated by your SEO lead) on how the information presented can be applied to the website.

Provide your team with a list of technical obstacles that exist on your current site – and provide solutions for each. During this discussion, also provide your team with information about SEO-friendly technical design, including everything from quicker page load speed to using breadcrumbs and site maps. At the very least, this will prevent your team from making the same mistake twice.

Educate your creative team on the importance of good content. Include information about how your team can leverage all of your company’s digital assets to create a more compelling user experience that will ultimately drive more natural search traffic and revenue.

Teach your team members that SEO is constantly evolving. Even after the site has launched, refreshing content, updating the blog, interacting with users, interpreting analytics and building backlinks should continue in a search-friendly way. By continuing your team’s SEO education, you can ensure your site is being updated with search in mind.

In the end, good SEO and good web design are the same thing. Through continuous and proactive search education, your web development team will become a BETTER web development team, something that is in everyone’s best interest.

Nick Roshon (@nickroshon) is a Search Analyst at iCrossing.

- Generating the most traffic
- Driving the most sales
- Attracting the most links

If you are redesigning or reorganizing a site, this exercise is something you’ll likely be required to do, but it’s also something worth looking at every few months to keep your site fresh. Once you have better understanding of which pages are the most productive, you have a few options for the pages that may be underperforming.

If you are using Google Analytics as your analytics platform, you can use pivot tables to identify pages that are not generating much search traffic. You can choose to redirect, repurpose, or decommission them all together. Each one of these tactics has an advantage and disadvantage, which are outlined below:

Redirecting Content
Redirecting content allows you to maintain much of the search equity that the previous page had accumulated. Assuming a 301 redirect is properly in place, the rankings of the previous page would be transferred over to the new URL. This is a good solution if your site has content that is no longer timely or expired offers. Any link equity that those pages had can be redirected to pages a level up and help that page rank better for its targeted keywords. You could also redirect pages that have a lot of links, but generate little search volume to their parent pages to help bump up the rankings of that page. This strategy could be profitable if your category pages are ranking in the top 10, but could use a boost to increase a few spots in the SERPs. As your pages climb in the SERPs, each incremental gain is more valuable as your approach the top spot. If you can go from 5 to 3 or 3 to 1 by redirecting well linked to but low traffic pages, it’s likely worth doing.

The downside to this strategy is that the number of keywords you can rank for decreases with every page you redirect. A well linked to, low traffic page, could use just a few more links and/or could be used to target some more attainable keywords. You also run the risk of search engine penalties if you egregiously start redirecting pages that are not relevant to their destinations. Although unlikely, if you go overboard with your redirect strategy you could catch the eye of the engines, which is never a good thing.

Repurposing Content
You can repurpose existing content in many different ways to increase its reach and effectiveness on your website. You can take the existing text content on your page and:

- Make it more comprehensive and creating some appealing infographics
- Use the content to make a related YouTube video, which you could embed on the page, or create a whole new video section on your site
- Create a podcast series using your page themes as topics

This will make the pages more appealing to visitors, and if enough value is added could improve conversion rates and attract more links. Some folks make the mistake of making the repurposed content too similar to what currently exists. If you’re going to create a video related to the content of one of your pages, don’t just get a microphone and read the text from the page while showing some images. Try to continually add value on top of what content is currently there.

Decommissioning Content
Poor content is like weeds in a garden. It takes away from user experience and brings the whole site down. If you have tons of extraneous pages and many of them have not been visited, have no links, and serve no purpose, it makes sense to conserve resources and let these pages return 404’s. It’s helpful to have custom 404 error pages set up so that the user can ultimately find what they are looking for and can have a positive site experience.

This can be useful if you have thousands or millions of pages that don’t get much if any traffic and have no links. Instead of wasting time and resources on redirects, just let them all return 404’s and slowly fade from the search indices. Unfortunately you won’t be getting any sort of SEO boost by decommissioning pages, but the majority of pages you’d be decommissioning won’t have much in the way of SEO equity in the first place.

Depending on the size of your website, business goals, and time available, developing a quarterly or even monthly content review would likely help keep the site organized and improve performance in search engines. The appropriate action won’t be identifiable until you can tell if the page in question has any search equity (traffic or links). If it does have value, you’re probably leaning towards the first or second option, while if there is little to no value, decommissioning may be the way to go. As with most things related to SEO, all suggestions and recommendations require context to be effective. Use your best judgment when reviewing your content..

David Shapiro is a Search Strategist at iCrossing.

Considering that no business has an unlimited amount of time, money or resources, and every additional piece of content costs a little of each, publishers need to be selective as to what type of content they should create to get the most bang for the buck.

Creating an SEO digital asset inventory would be a logical starting point. This allows you to review the content that already exists on your site, and gives you a better idea of what you have to work with. For each digital asset, you’ll want to at least note the URL, the title, description, keywords targeted, and a notes or additional details section for you to put miscellaneous information. Next step would be to perform searches within Google for your most profitable keywords, and see which additional content types show up in those results. Patterns will likely be visible after a few searches and will likely mimic Comscore’s findings in early 2008:

(Source: Comscore, “Types and Share of Universal Search Results“, April 2008)

From what I’ve seen, video and news still dominate the universal search results. If you don’t have time to research what content will show up for your keywords, you can start by creating video content and publishing press releases and articles that hopefully get picked up by news outlets (this is much easier said than done). Once you’ve done your research, and figured out what digital assets you currently have, and what type of content is appearing in your search results, you can accurately gauge how much additional content you need to create.

Videos
Outside of search results, video content can also help increase sales. Zappos (6% to 30% sales increase) and Marks and Spencer (90% sales increase for some products) have seen significant sales boosts based on their video content. Because YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine, you want to make sure you have a presence here. They offer a video keyword research tool which is identical to Google’s current keyword research tool, which will allow you to find additional keywords you should be targeting:

If in your previous research you found videos appearing in search results for your top performing keywords, you’ll want to try to incorporate that keyword into the title and description of your video to increase the likelihood that your video ranks for those keywords. Head over to Reel SEO if you want more comprehensive tips on how to do Video SEO.

News
Appearing in the Google news portion of universal search doesn’t have much commercial value, but the links that news generates can raise your rankings for your top revenue producing keywords, which can have a huge impact. Many press release services will put your content directly within Google news. If your site has product announcements or industry news, put out a release and pass it along to writers who cover your industry. Hopefully you get media attention and links, which result in higher search engine rankings and profits. Check out Adam Sherk’s great post on the topic for more information on how to optimize for Google News.

Images
Depending on your type of site, image search could be more of a drain on resources than a content type worth pursuing. Image traffic traditionally converts very poorly and could overwhelm a server. Often people searching for images are looking for pictures they can use on their own site. Given the right type of site, it may still be a path worth pursuing. Don’t take my word for it, test on your own site. Optimize some of your current images and see how well the traffic from sites like Flickr and/or Google Images converts. If you’re seeing significant revenue from these sources then by all means create more of this content and optimize it.

Here’s a tip: You can use a script to prevent other sites from serving up your images without linking back to you.

Other Content Types
There are many other content types that can be served up in universal search, such as blogs, books, and local, which is worthy of a post on its own due to its prevalence and potential value. It’s important to review search results for your primary keywords and create content that shows up in those search results. It’s also important to track their performance once you have visibility for these different content types. Keep investing time and money into creating content that is driving revenue/sales/leads for your business, and don’t be afraid to pull the plug on some content types that may be generating traffic, but not helping increase your bottom line.

David Shapiro is a Search Strategist at iCrossing.

Over the coming weeks, our search strategists will address various aspects of designing search-friendly enterprise websites, including digital asset optimization, search education, using search data to inform design and approaching common technical obstacles, among many others.

iCrossing’s David Shapiro starts the series on the topic of choosing the right digital assets for your business.

Rob Garner is Strategy Director for iCrossing.

The considerations for a social media governance model are numerous: brand identity/voice/tone, internal resources, staffing and stakeholders, work-flow adjustments, escalation policies, appropriate topics of conversation and language, identity/social equity “ownership” (ho does brand social equity belong to? the employee Tweeting on behalf of a brand or the brand?), legal issues and ramifications, industry regulations, content posting policies….well you get the point. While this may seem a bit of an arduous task, creating these governance models lay a crucial foundation, and are vital to any social media–ahem, digital– strategy and long term success (and they’re actually fun to create too, believe it or not).

The Rules of Engagement visual for the U.S. Air Force is an excellent example of extracting the heavy, often quasi-legalese rhetoric of what might be a governance policy and distilling it into a “user friendly” guide for internal stakeholders and participants in social media. Just the sort of thing that hangs nicely in your Tweeter’s cubicle

Brilliant visual. Clear and concise. #Military

Alisa Hansen (@alisamleo) is Senior Social Media Analyst at iCrossing.

Google increases to command a 79.02% natural search traffic share to enterprise level websites; Bing share decreases slightly from November to December by -0.19%; Yahoo! decreases 2.83% year over year.

Google’s share of natural click share rose 0.78% points from November to December, and rose 3.01% year-over-year, with a total share of 79.02%.  Yahoo declined slightly month-over-month into the single digits, from 10.07% to 9.95%, though year-over-year Yahoo has lost 2.83% share of all search traffic referred.  Bing natural traffic decreased by 0.19% points month-over-month, though it continued to grow its share of the search landscape by 1.07% year-over-year.

If the current trends continue, MSN/Bing will overtake Yahoo as the number 2 search engine at the end of Q1 2010 and Google will pass 80% market share in the same time frame.

About the Enterprise Natural Search Share Index

The Enterprise Natural Search Share Index is based on data from iCrossing’s proprietary search analytics platform, a robust natural and paid search tracking suite that is utilized by over 100 enterprise-level businesses for measuring search success. The report focuses only on natural search click referrals across the five major search engines and distribution partners, and is based on a large representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies, across all major verticals.

Stan Pugsley is director of business intelligence for iCrossing.
Rob Garner is Strategy Director for iCrossing.

Personalization – We have seen personalization (and, by association, re-targeting) expand significantly in 2009 and expect this to continue in 2010. Google rolled out Interest-Based Advertising (let’s call it behavioral, shall we?) and has been personalizing the delivery of their search ads for quite some time now; Microsoft has been offering behavioral targeting in search since 2006; and Yahoo! began offering both behavioral targeting and search re-targeting in 2009. This will be good for consumers and confusing for some advertisers who may feel like they’re losing control over when/where their ads are firing.

New Ad Products – 2009 also brought some exciting new products like Yahoo!’s Rich Ads in Search and Google’s Sitelinks, Plus Box, Product Ads and Live Ads. We expect to see more products along these lines in the coming year, including search products with more interactivity (think the “type in your zip code” functionality of RAIS). We’re looking to Microsoft to start innovating in the paid search space the way they have with Bing/Bing Maps/Bing Image Search, etc. They’ve proven that they have some innovative thinkers on the team so hopefully it will rub off on AdCenter. Finally, there’s no question that we’ll continue to see deeper integration with local search from all of the engines.

Binghoo! – Without a doubt the biggest market change in 2010 will be the Bing-Yahoo! partnership… assuming it goes through. If it does, we’re guessing that the two companies will race to have everything working by August-September, but will probably not be able to get their act together that quickly. We may see the organic integration working by the fall, but we’ll be surprised if AdCenter is powering search ads on Yahoo! in that short time frame. If we had to place a bet, we’d say this deal has a 75-80% chance of going through (mostly because no one is objecting except, of course, Google). Yahoo! really needs this if they want to stop their slow, painful slide into obscurity, and Steve Ballmer is desperate to get more folks using his expensive new toy. And, to be fair, Bing is actually quite good.

So what won’t happen in 2010? Or what can we expect in 2011? Mobile. Not in any earth shattering way, anyway. We have been waiting a long time for two things in mobile: advanced handsets and advanced data networks. The iPhone marked the arrival of legitimate handsets (followed by Android, etc.) but we have not seen the data networks catch up quite yet (AT&T in particular). The rollout of 4G networks in 2011 will hopefully fix that problem. Mobile ad targeting with GPS will eventually be a huge thing, but we don’t see it really catching on until 2011. Attribution modeling will also bloom in 2011. Its adoption will grow this year but we don’t think it will gain much serious momentum until 2011. Like mobile, attribution modeling won’t make sense for everyone – some verticals just don’t shift much when you move from last touch to a different model – but it will be a big deal for some advertisers in 2011.

Reid Spice is Senior Director of Search Media Strategy for iCrossing.