General International SEO

[Mike.Bean]

I have been asked about optimizing one of our e-commerce websites for international use. I have never attempted this before and I have a couple of general questions and I'm hoping someone can point me in even more directions of what all needs to be done.

Language - Will I need alternate languages even though we're targeting English speaking people in these countries?

Currency - Will I need options for this?

Can I copy my site onto another Top Level Domain?

What will get me to appear across Google's alternate country searches?

Can anyone point me in more helpful directions than I've been able to find myself on Google? I think the problem is I don't know exactly what I'm asking. Thanks in advance!

[MattAntonino]

I believe most of Aleyda Solis' epic international SEO checklist is still valid.

You'll also want to check a couple of updated & interesting articles here and here.

If you do end up using hreflang tags you can test them with the Flang tool. This ensures the tags you've setup are done correctly.

With hreflang you won't need alt languages but hreflang handles both language & location (region specific). So en-au and en-us are same language, different countries. Take a look through the documentation for it and see if you have further questions.