Foreign languages and first page listings on search engines

[onlinemediadirect]

I have a customer that has asked me to find out the best way to move forwards with foreign languages.

He sells Jukeboxes in the UK and has found recently that a large number of his customers are coming from abroad due to the financial climate.

So he wants to appear on the first page of google in Russia, Arabic countries, French speaking countries and China.

Whats the best route ?

Add pages to his current .co.uk site or look at purchasing domains for each country. Then submitting them to each google.

So Google.ru etc.

Thanks

[Keszi]

Hi Gerry,

I have dealed with same situation. Basically what we have done (since we have a gTLD .net) is that we have created sub-folders for each country and geo-targeted each sub-folder from GWT to the specific country.

Now, people say that having your own ccTLD (country codeTLD) can help you even more in rankings for local searches.

Another factor that you should consider, is moving the hosting of subfolder (if you are going for the first version) or ccTLD (if you use the second one) on a hosting from the targeted country.

P.S. if your client has a .co.uk domain (which is ccTLD) you can not geo-target a sub-folder from Google Webmasters Tools to another region, therefore I would advise you to buy their brand name in each country, check for a hosting, then start optimizing for the specific country.

I hope my answer helped,

Istvan

[onlinemediadirect]

I didnt realise you could geo target different sections of a website thats really cool to know. I will login to Webmaster tools now and take a look.

[Keszi]

Garry,

If you need help with that, let me know. I will write a quick step-by-step.

Greetings,

Istvan