Taking Over the World: Setting up Your Site for Effective International SEO

The Internet is the great equaliser, allowing small businesses to compete with large, and everybody to put forth their own opinions. While there are some advantages to being a big fish in the WWW pond, there are also some tricky issues to contend with. The first of these is hosting and targeting for international websites – today we explore some SEO based recommendations for businesses that are trying to take over the world!

International Site Setup Guidelines

There are three main site setup options available to make the most of your current reputation and audience while creating a website targeted to users in different countries:

Use a root domain ccTLD

Under this option, you would create different sites with different content targeted to different countries, but under the one domain. So, you’d have:

• www.pollywollydoodleholiday.com
• www.pollywollydoodleholiday.com.de
• www.pollywollydoodleholiday.com.ru
• …etc.

This is a simple method, but doesn’t share link juice or other ranking factors among the different domains.

Use subdomains

Alternatively, you could create de.pollywollydoodleholiday.com, ru.pollywollydoodleholiday.com, etc, as Wikipedia does. However, the results from this can be mixed. Constructing a site in this manner can be beneficial when seperating non-related content, however does not assist in building value into the domain to the same effect as using subfolders.

Use subfolders

Apple’s strategy is to use a single domain, and have subfolders for their different geographical areas. So, your German site might be: www.pollywollydoodleholiday.com/DE and your Russian site www.pollywollydoodleholiday.com/RU. The issue around this is a human one, where searchers from different countries are more likely to click on sites with their country-specific domain name (ie, .com.au in Australia).

The balancing act you need to undertake to decide on the best strategy can be dizzying … Web Marketing Experts can help you get the best SEO result for the long term.