To make your SEO as successful as possible in foreign markets, you should consider properly localising your websites for the regions you are targeting. Here are a few tips to help you get started with multilingual SEO.

Localise your content

The first step in multilingual SEO is to ensure your content is properly localised. There are two steps to achieving this. The first is to ensure that your English-language content is well-written and relevant to your target market. You should also ensure your content is culturally appropriate for the regions you will be publishing in. Remember that content that may be perfectly acceptable in the UK or USA, may cause offence in other parts of the world. This not only applies to your written content but also to the images and other multimedia elements on your website.

Once the English version of your content has been properly optimised for your target market, it’s time to get it translated. If you’re working on a tight budget, you could try one of the many online translation services, like Google Translate. These can give acceptable results, but they will never be completely accurate. A far better approach is to use a professional translator. This will ensure that all the nuances of your text are properly translated and idiosyncrasies, like metaphor and abbreviations, are accurately dealt with.

Translate keywords carefully

When it comes to keyword translation, you can’t rely on a service like Google Translate, or even a dictionary. To make sure your foreign-language website is optimised for the correct keywords, you need to have your keyword list looked at by a professional translator. They will also be able to help you with keyword research using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and other language-specific keyword tools.

Use country-specific domains

Remember that Google operates versions in over 100 regions. So, for your multilingual SEO campaigns to be successful, you need to be targeting the local search engines. Your rankings in these will be greatly improved if you host your website on the relevant ccTLD (country code Top Level Domain). For example, if your website is aimed at the Spanish market, use a .es domain (e.g. www.yourdomain.es). Your local search rankings will be boosted even further if you also host your foreign domains on servers located in the target country.

Building back links

It’s important to get as many back links as possible from websites within your target country. For example, if you have a .es domain, your rankings in ‘Google España’, and other local search engines, will be improved by getting back links from other .es domains. The principles for achieving this are just the same as your link-building efforts for your English websites. You should also research any local web directories which might be worth submitting to. As with any web directory you are considering submitting to, check to make sure it is well-established and has a decent PageRank. As with English-language SEO, links from directories are no substitute for good quality editorial links on contextually relevant websites.

You should be able to identify possible link partners in much the same way as you do with your English-language websites. Usually this involves analysing your competitors’ websites and targeting the websites where they have placed back links. You may need the assistance of a professional translator to assess the quality of the websites you propose to target and to help you draft e-mails to website owners.

Social media

You can use local social media marketing in your target regions for building links and driving traffic to your website. Again, the principles are the same as with your English-language websites. For example, submit your foreign-language website to relevant social bookmarking sites within your target markets. Find local blogs, especially those with the same ccTLD, and regularly leave comments or offer to provide a guest post in exchange for a back link. Try to find forums that are relevant to your website’s audience and start posting.

The techniques of multilingual SEO are much the same as those you would employ on your English-language websites. Remember that good SEO starts with well-written, relevant content. If you get this aspect right in your foreign-language websites, you stand a good chance of success in your SEO efforts.

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of Lingo24, a global translations service and localisation provider. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has 130 employees spanning four continents and clients in over sixty countries.

Contact Lingo24 with a translation request mentioning www.topnotchseo.co.uk before 30 November 2010 and receive a 10% discount on your first order.

A colleague and friend, Julie Cheung showed me some odd results in Yahoo’s site explorer this morning – The number of backlinks are shown to be very low for all sites (including the most popular ones out their such as apple.com)

For example:

This seems to be caused by the Merge with Bing and using Bing’s results. Performing the same query in Bing returns the same number of backlinks (188 in this case):

So if this remains thus, Open Site Explorer is you next best tool. However I presume Bing won’t leave it at this and will return true numbers in the coming months as to give users another use over Google.

Twitter has become a very important marketing tools in every industry and every place. The same goes for journalist’s. Actually, Twitter is better use for journalists than it is for many other jobs.

Below are some important tips every journalist should take note of before delving into the world of Twitter!

1. Twitter and RSS feeds are not the same

Lot’s of people use Twitter over traditional RSS feeds which isn’t a good thing. RSS feeds are easily managed and there is a small chance of you missing any major story, unlike Twitter, where the chance of missing major stories is high

2. Avoid automated Tweets

Try not to use automated Tweets. I.e. Tweets that are published by blogs and RSS readers as these become recognised immediately and your followers will get fed up with the (large?) number of these tweets staking up their Twitter home feed.

3. Twitter and business branding

This is very important. Remember that although it may be your personal account, you are indirectly representing your company and thus, one small mistake can affect the image of of the business and and lead to an unfortunate end between yourself and your company.

4. Find witnesses immediately

A quick search on http://search.twitter.com will find people who just witnessed a major event taking place minutes ago. Tweet them and ask for their comments.

5. Take input from followers

If you’re covering a major story then mention this in your Tweet. Also ask for feedback. This will allow you to “fine-tune“ you story and make it all the more interesting.

6. Value your followers

Twitter users are not going to follow you for nothing. Give something back, be like them and interact with them once in a while. Maybe meet up with them once in a few months at a neutral venue such as a bowling arena etc.

7. Build good relationships the right way

Don’t expect your follower to become good links and good contacts overnight. You have to contact them, ask questions, respond back and even follow people the follow. As a journalist, working to gain a good contact that will be temporary is pointless. You need to ensure it’s long-term for your own advantage.

8. Maintain your own account?

It’s best to maintain your own account and don’t let anyone else Tweet on it. Simply because a Tweet by someone else might go unnoticed by you and leave a negative image on yourself. Remember, once you’re Twitter profile has  a couple of thousand followers, 1 “wrong” Tweet will make it to the eye’s of every journalist in the UK!

9. Add a picture to your profile

If it’s a personal account not associated with your company or any website you own, then a  picture will increase the chance users following you first time.

10. Don’t waste too much time on Twitter

Although Twitter is a good good thing, spending too much time on it will only have negative effects on your career and life.

Conclusion

Although these tips are tailored towards a journalist, many of them will apply to people in every position and career. Just know which one’s to take!

What is Blekko?

blekko is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. slashtags search only the sites you want and cut out the spam sites. use friends, experts, community or your own slashtags to slash in what you want and slash out what you don’t.

Read more at Blekko’s website.

Now you know what Blekko is, where’s the great tool I speak about?

Blekko takes slashtags to refine it’s search results however certain slashtag’s reveal some different results. I’m talking about the /SEO tag:

This is just a taste of what Blekko have to offer.

There are many more options and data contained within the /SEO slashtag (including some tasty “link” data) and a great duplicate content checker – for both internal and external data – which does have the potential of beating Copyscape at its own game.

Conclusion

The only downfall (at the moment) is its index size. We all know and they also admit it’s not as large as Google or Bing so although the data is good, it’s not as reliable just yet! I thought I’d do a quick check for 3 sites and check how many backlinks each have in a few different sources:

• I chose page links only
• I’m yet not sure if Blekko separates “nofollow” links and if their link data is domain links or page links

Not bad but still some way to go. For now, Yahoo and OSE will have to do…!

Blekko is in closed private beta. if you’d like an invite, follow Blekko on twitter or send them a tweet.

Ever since Bing launched, I’ve kept a close eye on it and followed it closely as an SEO. Regularly I am required to perform in-depth analysis into websites prior to starting their SEO campaign and also those sites which should be ranking higher and one major aspect of this analysis is with regards to on-page.

My main tool to find problems with a site are the search engines themselves using their advance operators and this is where Bing is much better than Google IMO. We know Google likes to filter out seemingly non-relevant results and sometimes due to this, also *hides* important results (such as internal homepage duplicates etc).

Anyhow, some advance Bing operators and uses are explained below.

Generate an RSS Feed for search results in Bing

Search Bing for your keyword and thereafter append the URL of the results page by

&format=rss

This will generate an RSS feed for the results!

Contains:

similar to the filetype: operator but allows you to search for a particular file-type inside a web page. Some examples:

• “SEO” contains:pdf
• site:www.adobe.com contains:pdf
• LinkFromDomain:microsoft.com contains:docx

LinkFromDomain:

This is my favourite. This command will list all the outbound links a website contains (basically, the opposite of the link: command).

ip:

Returns all websites hosted under a particular ip.

loc:

The LOC: operator allows you to search for webpages within a specific country or region. So I want to search for “SEO” but only want to see websites from Home King:

For a full list of country codes, please refer to Country, region, and language codes.

near:

This is a cool operator. This operator searches for a particular word within a range of another word:

The above returns all webpages containing the word “Samurai” that appears within 3 words of the word “Murasame”

language:

Returns webpages in a specific language:

For a full list of language codes, please refer to Country, region, and language codes.

If you’re competing in a competitive industry then you need to keep a sharp eye on each backlink and whether your backlinks are increasing or decreasing in number and more importantly quality over time. Our CTO at Just Search Neil Walker has posted some good techniques over at his site SEO Mad and many analysis of various aspects of SEO and after an interesting read through them, I’ve decided to write my own!

The big question – Is your link building efforts paying off?

Outcome of this analysis

You’ll have a visual representation of the

• Number of links lost in the last month (or a number of months if you have the data collected)
• Number of new links gained
• Lost and Gained link comparison
• Month Comparison between you and your competitor

The links will be grouped by Page authority, Domain authority and Anchor text. a little further work will also allow you to group more metrics such as Geo Location etc.

How are we going to achieve this?

• Excel and Pivot tables
• Open Site Explorer
  Why? Because we know when an update takes place unlike other services.

Note: Open Site Explorer update their index approximately every 30 days so unless you have last month’s link data for you site, you’ll have to wait for the next update for real data.

Step One – The Data

Download a chosen website’s backlinks (in CSV format) from Open Site Explorer using the following options:

Note: an SEOMoz Pro Account is required to download upto 10’000 links.

If you already have your backlink data from last month or earlier, you can move onto step 2; otherwise you need to wait until the next Linkscape Update.

Once the update takes place, download another CSV using the same settings above so you will now have 2 sets of backlink data for your site – one being from the month before.

Step Two – Organise

Open both spreadsheets in Excel and delete the first 6 lines in both:

Scroll to the bottom of last months CSV and add some hash’s (or #):

Copy all the link data from this month’s spreadsheet and paste it into last month’s sheet below the hashed line:

Next:

• Create a new column (called “Month”) on the right of “Target URL”
• Fill the “Month” column with the month you took your data for. e.g. before the hash’s, “January” and after the hash’s “February”
• Delete the “Title” Column.
• Format all the data as a Table

Step 3

Highlight all the cells below the “URL” heading

Click “Conditional Formatting” > “Highlight Cells Rules” > “Duplicate Values”

Thereafter select “Unique” with a light red fill

Now the interesting bit. Click on the small arrow besides “URL” and filter by the colour above:

This list is the pearl amongst the stones. Let me explain.

All the links listed above our hashed line are those links which you had last month but have lost this month (according to Open SIte Explorer) and those below the hashed line are the new links you have gained which you didn’t have last month.

Next, we’re going to compare each link from last month to this month using various metrics such as Page Authority.

Step 4 – Pivot

Before moving on, Delete the hashed line in your table.

To graphically compare the links, we’re going to use a Pivot table in Excel. To do this:

Highlight your table and click “Insert” > “Pivot Table” > “Pivot Chart” > “Click OK”:

Now set you Pivot with the following options (“Values” must be set to “Count” and not “Sum”):

Next change you chart type to either a “Line” or “Area” type. I’m going to choose a “Stacked area”:

And there you have it!

From the above, we can see the links we have gained in the new month are overall more weightier and better than those we have lost over the last month.

The beauty about Pivot Charts are that we can easily switch metrics so if I wanted to compare using  “Domain Authority”, I only need to switch it:

Note: You can also compare using “Anchor text”, “Linking root domains”” etc and can add more metrics to the list (if you can get your hands on them such as the geo location of each link).

Note: The data is only as accurate as Open Site Explorer is.

Note: I used made up data for the above

How can this data be used

• Measure your efforts
• Spy on competitors and discover where they are getting new links from
• Compare your links with that of a competitor using the same Pivot chart (I might post something on this as a follow-up to this article)

One factor in SEO which many people are unaware of is the effect of Class C IP Addresses. Many Webmasters haven’t heard of the term Class C and thus naturally overlook this.

In this article, I’m going to explain the basics of what a Class C IP is, why it’s an important factor in SEO – both on-page and off-page.

Class C IP

In layman terms, an IP address consists of 4 parts:

We call the first 3 parts the Class C of an IP. So for example:

• 123.456.789.111 and 123.456.789.222 are in the same Class C
• 123.456.123.111 and 123.456.789.222 are in two different Class C’s

Two websites that are hosted on the same Class C IP range will probably be stored on servers in the same room or near each other and managed by the same hosting company. Certain hosts who promote themselves by offering “SEO Hosting” will generally have access to multiple Class C addresses and be able to supply you with multiple Class C addresses at a small cost – A quick search on Google will yield many results.

Class C and Off-Page SEO

Search Engines track the number of IP addresses a website has been through and although sometimes it’s necessary, too many changes will likely be detrimental because it will give the impression of illegal sites (that go down and get banned by their host 1 week and come back the next via another host). Yahoo Site Explorer display various statistics about your site which include “Known Hosts on This Site” which can give you an idea of how many host’s a site has been through: In terms of Backlinks, having 10’000 links from the same Class C IP has minimum weight and 50 links of a similar quality from different IP addresses are more valuable to the Search Engines. For sites you wish to rank in the UK, you should concentrate more on building links from Class C IP’s that are located in the UK (of course, if the TLD is .uk, it will help but that’s another topic for another time .

Class C and On-Page SEO

What is there to analyse in terms of on-page? With regards to links from your site – If, 90% (for example) of links point to the same site/IP, this won’t be seen as quality content for users and will seem like spam to the search engines. You can use Bing’s search command “LinkFromDomain” so see a list of links from your site: Again, looking at the geo location side, if you want a site to rank in the UK then your site should be primarily aimed at UK users and so, linking out to Class C’s located in other parts of the world should be kept to a minimum.

Class C SEO Tool

I’ve decided to put together a quick tool for users to find the Class C of multiple Domain Names and should be ready in the next 2 weeks!

Many of you would like to know the number of RSS subscribers certain websites have for various reasons such as:

• Popularity
• Competition
• What’s the average for your industry
• Curiosity
• Fun!

Many sites hide their Feedburner counter (Chicklet) until they reach a high number of subscribers.

The technique I’m going to show you will only work for sites that have enabled FeedCount in Feedburner:goog

So, how do you find the magic number? Simple. Copy and Paste the URL below into your browser replacing “IDName” with the Feed name:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/IDName

For example, The Feed for Web Designer Online is http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebDesignerOnline so if I wasn’t displaying the number of subscribers, you can simply go to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/WebDesignerOnline

To find out!

Recently, I was doing a site command on Google for “Bing.com” using Firefox and came across a certain link which didn’t seem to do anything until I realised after a few day’s, the background image on Bing hasn’t been showing!

Checking in Chrome, it was fine:

So? There must be a cookie set on my browser.

Using Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar:

Fixed the Issue!

So the URL? Here you go -

http://www.bing.com/?rb=0

(I’m sure this will be useful if you want to have a joke or even divert people away from Bing! A simple link in an email will do the trick!)

This URL passes a variable to Bing “rb” with a value of 0 which set’s a cookie in your browser. So, going a (useless) step ahead, let’s analyse the cookie:

Again, using the Web Developer Toolbar, we can view the cookies for a domain:

and using this, I analysed the domain with and without the cookie set which gave me the cookie in question:

Name: _UR

Top Notch SEO has just re-launched (this time for good!). You will probably guess from the name this site is all about the best topic ever – SEO (or so I say).

Daily, more people are realising the importance of ranking high in the Major Search Engines Google, Bing and Yahoo due to which there has been a change on how SEO has been looked upon. Lots of Top Web Designers and Developers have lost their contracts and work due to their inability when it comes to SEO.

Now this is why we’re here. To help you all (designers, developers and everyone else who owns a website) to understand and become top notch at SEO!

Some of the things you can expect here

• High Quality SEO Articles
  Not your usual 300 word articles
• Downloadable Resources
• Unique SEO Tools (in the future)
• Interviews with top SEO’s around the world
• etc…

Tell us what you would like to see here

TNSEO is a brand new site and there isn’t a better time to have your say on what you would like to see here. Please share your ideas and you can be sure to see them materialise shortly afterwards.