How can I rank couple of pages to a specific geography ?

[processia]

Hi guys,

I have a pretty good success in many of my keyword on google US. We are a multi-country company and would like to get better ranking on all these countries. I know it's a long run and we need to by patient to get the rank desired. We are getting the slowly, bu surely.

In the next couple of months, we will be attending a conference where we will have a booth and we would like to conduct a campaign to invite customers to join us. My question is : Is there an efficient way to have just couple of  pages on our web site that could potentially rank fast on a specific geography ? Europe is my target audience ( France an UK ).

If you have any advice, I would appreciate.

Best regards,

[sesertin]

Best way to rank in France is to write French content, hire a .fr domain and obtain freanch links. For the UK English content is good, If you have a multinational tld like .net .biz is good as well, if you have .us you can consider buying a .cu.uk. What is important to obtain links from English sites, you can find English directories on this site somewhere: http://www.seo-expert-services.co.uk/ (I have never used them so far). Another thing to add a meta distrubution content="global" to your page.

I don't know what you are dealing with exactly but you can also consider adding geographical data to your search querries ex: not simply business solutions but business solutions uk or london or so. Look for what is being searched.

[SimonCullum]

Hi Marc

That's a good answer by Zsolt.

I'd just like to add that regarding the French domain, it would be an idea to host the website on the French domain with a Hosting Provider that's based in France. The physical location of a website (usually determined by the IP address) can help with geo-targeting.

Regards

Simon

[processia]

Does it mean I will need to have duplicate version of my website ? if I redirect my french domain to mys .com domain, should this be enough ?

Best regards,

[SimonCullum]

Hi there,

Nope, a duplicate website can be avoided. For the French version, you could have a totally separate website, with the content in French. No need to redirect the site, it could be hosted in France as a separate website. As the content would be in a different language and hosted in a different country, it wouldn't be duplicate so long as it's with a reputable hosting provider and truly is in French.

Alternatively, you could host the whole website on the one .com domain, providing different languages within the one website. Content Management Systems can certainly help, http://www.episerver.com/en/Products/Content/ can provide websites in different languages.

However if the content is to be different, not just a translation, then you're better off hosting a completely separate website in each country that you choose.

Regards

Simon

[sesertin]

Just as I would have said

[processia]

Well, I am using drupal as CMS, and I already have both language translated at the same location. It would be very complicated to have a duplicate web site/different domain and manage it.

So , if you are saying that I need a .fr and .co.uk, domain, is a simple redirecte will do the job ? I could potentially redirect the french content www.site.fr  to www.site.com/fr ?

Is this the right way of doing it ?

[sesertin]

Actually you do not necessarily need to redirect. Hiring a new domain, hosting in the target country, giving the distribution meta is the most you can do. If you purchase a .fr or a .co.uk domain and you completely redirect it to the .com than it is pointless in my opinion as french content will never show up on the .fr domain and so with the .co.uk one. I am optimising for Hungary, when my keywords are not available with a .hu tld I often use .com or .info. I do not host my sites in Hungary. The language of the content and the links from Hungarian pages are enough but do note that we do not have a solid culture on internet, so reaching a position in the UK or France may be much harder. Maybe if you have a site with a lot of backlins simply having a separate folder for the french content is enough. I can not help you to decide whether to put a .fr to the end of the url, or to use a different sub like fr.site.com. Wikipedia uses the second so I prefer that maybe they are doing something right.