Global SEO Targeting

[Socialdude]

Hi,

I have a website currently on the domain example.co.uk (.com is not available)

I'm looking to enter other markets such as Brazil, Russia - obviously content will need to change to suit the desired market / language.

I'm looking for some information on the best practice to enter foreign markets.

I was thinking maybe to create individual sites for each location eg: example.br example.ru

This way I could localise each site in terms of business directories, content, language etc.

Or

have my example.co.uk with various languages on it

Experience, suggestions are welcomed - thanks.

[NicoDavila]

Hi Socialdude,

Im working on global market but in on of my sites I have 3 languages on the same domain (same TDL). I read somewhere (I think was a Google article about multiple languages) and this article says that there are ways to do this properly. The way I choose is:

www.mysite.com/es ---> Spanish

www.mysite.com/en --->English

www.mysite.com/pt --->Portugues

I set the htacces in order to redirect the language of the computer/browser who is seeing the website. Anyway the user can change the language.

Then I have all my baclinks to .com or com/es,com/en,com/pt.

Check Google guidelines for mutiple languages.

I hope this could help you.

[Socialdude]

Thanks for the reply but it's not really useful. I'm aware of that method & mentioned that the .com is not available therefore I need an alternative method. Hope things work out for you

[john4math]

If you create individual sites for each location, this will automatically geotarget your sites in the SERPs for those countries.  Each site will be starting from scratch in terms of domain authority, but if you can overcome that hurdle you'll be off and running.

If your original domain was a .com, it seems more normal to have the directories for different languages, but with a .co.uk would that be weird?  I'm an American and .co.uk sites don't pop up on my radar all that often.  Doing it the way that NicoDavila has pointed out does have the bonus of providing your current domain authority to each localization of the site.  Then you can set those to geotarget those country specific directories in your site in Google Webmaster Tools, and by setting the language & country in a meta tag or in your HTTP headers (for Bing & other search engines).

[Socialdude]

Thanks for the input John,

Considering im on .co.uk & .com is unavailable

Based on your suggestion I think its best that I create a another website using .ru & best to build that...

Cheers..