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Having the same content, in the same language to target different countries would likely be considered duplicate content. Sounds good for users and search engines to me. Not sure I understand this question. There are a variety of ways you can set country targeting on a .com domain - contact info on the page, country setting in Google Webmaster Tools, etc.

I would say... Best Answer! Great job Robert

Virrtuo Your question is very very broad so I will keep it very very general: Define the customer your client wants Define the query terms your client's customer searches on there will be high competition terms that need patience there will be lower competition terms that you should search for to get lower hanging (slower falling) fruit this is where you will analyze the keywords and pick what you believe to be the best starting point for them to find clients. Do not skimp on the time you allocate for this process. Make a decision on what you will use. (200 pages covering every term is not the way to start). Look at website as is and grade it based on Architecture Is it built in a way that does not cause problems for indexing, Does it have too many internal links and ads, is on page SEO near perfect, does the navigation lend itself to easy movement for the searcher, does it have good content that speaks to the person coming to the site (does content = query), is the content fresh. Meta Description When I search on "staff leasing" for example and read the snippet on the SERP, do I read about how your client will solve my staff leasing problem or about what a great company they are (STAFF LEASING please) When I land on that page because of your stellar meta description, do I easily find the answer to my questions, am I compelled to contact you?, have you made it very simple for me to do that? If I do, are you sure you are tracking everything about that contact and your client will follow through on it (I spend 10% of our time on insuring the client followed through when developing business leads - it is important). Wherever your client is, have you absolutely, positively, without a doubt maximized local for them? If not start now, no, I mean it stop reading and go do it now. Now, if that is all in place and wired very tightly, I will begin to analyze results by looking at analytics, webmaster tools, campaign reports and deciding where I may need to strengthen pages, meta descriptions, etc. and where I need to put up others. I need to know that I am either moving a page up (and it is getting traffic) or not. If it is page 1 number one and no one goes there are converts there, there is a problem or two. Assuming you have done all of this and you are beginning to get traction, see some leads, etc. you need to keep after it, when you find terms that don't work, you can quit bothering with them, change them, add a new page, etc. Make sure your client is keeping you abreast as to their industry as they are the subject matter expert not you. They need to be told to write a blog or get someone to be the info giver to one of your copywriters, etc. They need to keep you appraised of every event they attend, convention, etc. you need to go grab those links. Keep up with infographics, link bait, etc. BUT, if you get that first - prior to everything else, it will not matter. Get the first part first. Then the other. Lastly, now to really help them, get up every morning an hour early and learn the potential impact of Schema, or the next pandanization, or etc. Read, study, question, etc. When you see someone ask a question on moz, take ten minutes and answer it, you will either do well, medium, or poorly. When you do well people will clap, when you do medium people will say, OK, when you do poorly people will correct you....and you will learn. OK, very lastly, have fun, make some money, smile.

If money is no object then Rackspace are your people.Not the cheapest, but there service is top notch and their Fanatical Support means that if you call you get through to a techie within 5 rings or something daft like that. Been with them on a dedicated server for 8 years, never had any major issues.

hi hannah, thx for the answer and the great insights. The problem is that for legal reason we need to show US visitors only the US version of the site. We can not give them the choice to choose other non-US versions

It makes tons of sense. Thank you

Sure can. I do hosting. about to set up in new premises. What sort of site is it? http://thatsit.com.au/

Hi Nicole, Your situation adds an interesting twist. First let me share I do not have personal experience with this particular situation where the images contain translated text and the only text which is being auto-translated is the alt tags and page title. If anyone else has experience with a similar situation please jump in! If I am understanding you correctly, the main site might be NicolesGreetingCards.com, and you may offer a Spanish folder such as NicolesGreetingCards.com/es for your Spanish cards. On the main site you would have a "Merry Christmas" greeting card, where your /es folder would have a "Feliz Navidad" greeting card. Assuming my understanding is correct I would share the following feedback: Google focuses on country-specific content rather moreso then language specific. Spanish in Mexico (/mx) is not the same as Spanish in Spain (/es). The same is true for English as US English is not the same as UK English. I would recommend offering a folder for each country rather then each language. Your country folders should not only adjust for language but for all local factors. For example currency, measurement systems, laws, customs, etc. My inexperienced guess is since you are performing very little translating it would be safe to use the automatic translations, but I would recommend using Mechanical Turk or a similar outsource worker approach for translations. It is exceptionally cheap and easy to use. It seems you really should have some actual text as content. Whatever images you offer should ideally be searchable. Some types of cards I have seen are "Happy Birthday", "Happy Birthday from Son", "Happy Birthday from Wife", "Happy Birthday from Father", etc. The addition of those categories or minimal amount of text would help users locate the cards they seek. This text would require translation as well. Be sure to use the language meta tags for translated content. Google should mostly pick up that /es is for Spain, but you want to provide all the proper signals to be certain they handle your content properly. Good luck!

Hi David, Where you host a site isn't regarded as a strong ranking factor internationally - perhaps in the past it did make a difference, but I think that the search engines disregard this now (probably because it throws up too many issues - e.g. lots of UK targeted sites are hosted in the US). However - site speed can affect rankings - and more importantly users - I guess I'm saying you need 'good' hosting, but it doesn't matter where it's located. I hope this helps, Hannah

Hey Melissa, If you are going to use a subfolder on your company page as: www.company.com/canada/ then you will benefit from some link juice from your company site. But in long term, I would go for ccTLD. Although you will have to build the "link-reputation" from almost zero, you can better optimize it for the specific country (in our case Canada). Also it would be better to gain a hosting package that is based in Canada, many small factors, BUT 1+1 makes 2, right? I hope it helped, Istvan

Hey Alex, Screaming Frog is hands down the best desktop crawling software and it has most of what you are looking for. -Mike

I hear you. Do you think I could do it like this? www.forexDotcom:  Left selection other countries, right selection only 4 languages in the US We have large number of US visitors going to 4 language pages, we could offer limited content and call to action for these...and get rid of low traffic languages Do you have a couple of samples of sites that do a good job targeting international and US?

Hi Keith, In my experience Google mainly crawls from the US. You're quite right, GeoIP redirection can cause major issues with indexation - as if you're redirecting everything from the US to the .com googlebot can't see the .co.uk site. As such, I'm not a fan. Rather than implementing a hard redirect I prefer Amazon's approach. If you visit the amazon.com site from a UK IP you get a javascript overlay that invites you to visit the .co.uk version of the site instead - they let the user decide which site to view rather than actually redirecting them. This is a nice solution as it ensures that the search bots can crawl both versions of the site, and rankings aren't endangered. I hope this helps, Hannah

The Seomoz search bar does a great job. Take a look at the SERP control panel and use a custom search profile. More information on that here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-personalized-search Altenatively add this query string to the end of google.co.uk /search?q=widgets&pws=0&gl=us This is using google.co.uk to search for widgets in the United States. q=   any keyword (multiple keywords need to be seperated with a +) i.e  q=blue+widgets gl= location you want to search -   gl=us would be correct in your case. There are many other ways but I find these the most useful. I hope they help.

Hi Alan, Thanks for your response and a very valid point. Duplicate content wont be a big issue as brand.com is very light on content for each location so the sub domain will have a lot of new content (and some re-written content). Good tip on the regional data. Will make sure we implement this.

So, was your hierarchy like this? GER = www.domain.de = German language and URLs version of www.domain.com FRA = www.domain.fr = French language and URLs version of www.domain.com ...and so on  and so on?

Hi Keith, Thanks for your comment.  I will take a look at what Google has to offer here. Do you think there are any negatives to using this on a website?