SEO Challenges related to Content for International Sites

Challenges for SEO : Content for International Sites
So what are some of the challenges you face while optimizing a website when it comes to Content?
We all know content is king, But how do you come with the content and what are the challenges you face while optimizing the site?

• Imagine that the site is multilingual. How would you deal with it?
• How about your content if you are targeting customers from all parts of the world? Some of the word used in American English is different from British English like Colour, optimise etc, so are you going to include all these phrases within your site??? Visitors who visit your site from the US will think that you there is a typo. How do you deal with this?
• How about mispells within different phrases in different territories?
• Translated pages, how do you translate in the first place? do you hire a translator ? If so, how do you communicate with them for specific phrases, a translated page need to be optimized as well. How do you optimize it? Do you take the extra step to learn some if the phrases?
• It will be a real challenge for some of the sites that are targeting people from different parts of a specifc country, Imagine India for that matter, You will have to speak the native language for each city , state and district in some cases. Tamil speaking visitors from Coimbatore for example will be different from Chennnai tamil. How will they search.
• And most of all, Google has its own search engines for each language. Hindi, Tamil etc. How do you optimize for that language?? Pretty scary ahh
• And how about now with the search wiki, and personalized search results, when someone is logged into the Gmail, the search results will be entirely different from those who are not logged in. How do you optimize for both?
• How about search wiki when someone votes for their fav sites, next time how do optimize?

Take an extra step and spend some time on keyword research and understand what that particular phrase means. Research on that keyword. Post your keywords and questions within a forum or a blog or to an expert in that particular language, you will be amazed by the answers you get. Take that and do your homework. research more using tools like Keyword research, Analytics keyword research tool, Google trends etc. Doing some research and searching on some of the keyword list, First you atleast need to have a basic keyword list by doing some homework. And using that keyword list do indepth study on that and other possible keywords and based on that keyword ask your translator or the content writer to come up with the content.

Optimizing different countries and spellings used in that country. And think about the slangs too. So how do you implement all those keywords within a site, well. this is my personal opinion, You have some pages that are not that important right? Like lets say your copyright page, your policy page, your FAQ page, Partners page, or create a additional page or write a blog post specifically for that region or country and include those keywords within those pages, chances are that if your other pages are ranking high these pages will also rank high for specific region. If you have created a local listings or may be a review from visitor from UK, or a tesimonial from that specific country, ask them to write a blog post or use their questions and include those keywords within those content. What you are doing here is, you optimize for both UK and US for example. If your target audience are from US lets say, 70% and 30 % UK, concentrate and writing and coming up with content for the 70 % in the important pages and use the rest of the pages for that 30 %

Mispells needs to be researched and as mentioned above, use those mispells in those pages.

Translated pages needs special attention, You again need to spend some time on that particular keywords, Ask to some of the non techie average people what that means to them, Will they use those keywords for searching, conduct a survey, use some of the bloggers to help you, they will be happy to help you, If anyone wants to know more about Tamil and wants to optimize and target people from Tamilnadu, I would be happy to give some inputs as a user.

Analytics, The best tool you can use to analyze and target the right audience. Find out the pattern and how people are using your site, How about the repeat visitor, how long they stay in your site? How about the pages, what pages are they visiting and staying . The Exit page, why? When and how they are exiting? Did they complete the goal before they exit, if not what was wrong. this needs a understanding of users, User behaviour, the site etc. Use Analytics in order to optimize and work on the Search Wiki page optimization and personalized SEO

What is your question? do you have any tips? Any inputs? feel free to comment here , we will dicsuss and share our thoughts

Hope you are having good year