What HREF should be used to target the market of the foreigners?

[rootsalad]

Usually, foreigners use a local computer (system language), on a local google but are searching in their native language for topics related with their native language. It's a mess for us and google it seems.

In example, if a venezuelan person living in France (Paris), on a french AZERTY computer (not literally... there is no such thing as a french computer), on Google.fr, search for a venezuelan arepa recipe using the keyword "receta arepa" in spanish of course, he is expecting the result to be in spanish.

How could we optimize our pages with HREF or other tricks to rank as high as possible with that configuration? This is obviously just an example, but it represents the problem I am facing.

[gfiorelli1]

I your specific case - targeting spanish speaking people residing in another country than (in your case) Venezuela - then you should have this kind of hreflang:

<rel="alternate" hreflang="es-FR" href="the content in spanish url"></rel="alternate">

This way you're telling google to show the URL in Spanish to people searching in Spanish but living in France.

[rootsalad]

Thanks a lot Gianluca, I thought we were limited to languages existing inside the targeted country.

I'll try it and check if there is any kind of ranking boost. For now, I have nothing set in "webmaster tools" or on the code.