Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks guys really appreciate the advice. We've decided to buy the CCTLDs and hold them (to avoid anyone else from taking them) but we're going to move ahead and follow your suggestions of using HREFLANG.

I've been asked to rank the website of an international association under the same keywords but in multiple languages (they rank very highly for English speaking countries), however they only have the one website with 1 .com domain.

Question: Is the better approach to translate the site in multiple languages and then allow people to select the language they desire?

OR

Buy ccTLD and run the site multiple times in different languages as separate entities?

Mike Salt

ipositions.co.uk

ipositions

(Yeah that's us, but we deal with small businesses more than we deal with large companies since we're not a massive company ourselves)

If you're new to SEO I would recommend 'All in One SEO'

But why?

Ages ago when I got involved in the SEO game I was told that Wordpress is better for SEO and for that reason I use it religiously. From a web design point of view Joomla seems to offer more functionality so my question is which CMS do you guys feel best serves an SEO effort?

No problem Barney good luck!

Hey Barney I'd be happy to have a chat with you if you have the time, We deal with loads of UK clients at that price range. If you message me your number I'll give you a call (and show you some proof :))

Where are you based ?

Can you post a link to the page, I'll be happy to tell you how to do it.

First of all I should point out that the H1 tag will not make or break your ranking. It holds very little importance in Google's consideration of your page.

While it is best practice to have it in order to give a title to your article, product etc. I would not hide it in another tab. For one Google does not see your site as humans do, in the source code the H1 tag will appear very low on the page if it's hidden in a tab which brings down the value of having that H1 tag even more.

However the most important thing I'd like to say is this, in your example it appears that you wish to rank for the keyphrase  'White business shirt'. I am assuming that you have more than 1 product page that would fall under this category apart from 'White poplin classic fit'. Does that mean that you wish to optimize all those pages for the same keyword? If the answer is yes I should remind you that you should never target a long tail keyword with more than one page. It might be a good idea to simply optimize the category page for each product line:

Title - (Luxury/affordable/cheap whatever you want) Buy white business shirts

Meta description - A wide range of white business shirts by Jason Muller

H1 tag-White business shirts

• Link to 'White poplin classic fit'
• Link to White poplin medium fit'
• Link ''White poplin large fit'

Some sort of description of what poplin means, the material, the grade of white these shirts are, where they were made, etc.

and the other on-site seo steps we usually take to make Google happy.

This is how we do all our e-commerce SEO and it works great for us, hope this helped.

What I'd do is set up a poll/survey for people to vote for their favorite restaurant and then announce the winner on a monthly basis.

I would then send an email to the restaurants telling them about the competition and encourage them to get people who visit their site to go and vote for them on your site.(Easy back links and visitors)

Finally I would offer a $50/100 voucher for a random person who voted for the winning restaurant to spend at that restaurant. (This will encourage the restaurants to add the link in the first place and the visitors to make the effort to go to your site and use it.)

The setup for this would take no more than 10 minutes. so it's a very easy thing to do and will get the ball rolling very quickly.

Hope this helps

This really depends on the topic of your site. Could you give some indication?

I'd build a new adsense site on Lowcarddiet.com but I'd host it with a different company so I don't get penalized for having the same C block address for both sites.

To clarify you would only need to do this since you're trying to optimize the two sites for the same keyword,

From what I've seen Google assumes that sites hosted by two different hosts are probably run by separate entities, and therefore links between the two sites are less likely to appear as an effort to game the SERPs.

This of course brings up the question of whether EMDs are still worth buying in which case I would say they are.

Finally the most important question is whether you already have a presence on the first page for that keyword, if you've got the number one spot I would justify making the effort of getting another site there, if not then your time might be better spent improving your rank for that keyword.

Hope this helps

I really think the biggest factor is whether all the content is going to be exactly the same but translated in dif. languages or you are creating a product or service that spans 10 different countries.

For example; if you are creating a site about how to stop smoking or about the same products and you translate that to 10 different languages then I suggest using Ryan's approach.

If however you are creating something country specific, like a directory for businesses in each specific country then I would simply run with 10 domains (if you're lucky enough to find the same name with each ccTLD for the countries you're targeting)

I'm guessing that if you are willing to make the effort to redo the content in so many languages then the financial payout should warrant spending the money to buy 10 domains + hosting etc.

If you specified the topic of your site someone who's already done it might offer better advice, hope this helps

I don't think it will make much of a difference if you say branding branding branding, ultimately what you can do is try it, then wait till the page gets ranked, remove two of the brandings, see what happens, then act accordingly. If it sounds natural, like a pep talk, then you won't have any issues.

Was it $400 monthly or what?

If you've paid a 1 off fee of $400 for "SEO" then you did not receive what most of us on this site would call search engine optimization. In other words rather than being scammed, you just bought into something which was not SEO. You are right though in saying that someone willing to take your $400 for something he calls SEO is probably the kind of person who would ruin your site if you push for a refund (I've seen some dodgy companies do this to their clients in the past)

Just cut your losses, find a better SEO company and let them deal with whatever damage has been caused to your site by this other company.

Be prepared to spend quite a lot more than $400 though, if you're going to insist on cheap don't expect miracles.

Here's an old article by Rand about Flash: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/flash-and-seo-compelling-reasons-why-search-engines-flash-still-dont-mix

My two cents, Flash sucks the life out of SEO.

From your question you mentioned 2 or 3 competitors which means that you should still be able to achieve a first page position for the keywords you're targeting but perhaps not the top 3. In that case it comes down not only to optimization and link building; Is your site as useful as theirs?

A question I very rarely hear people asking in the SEO field is "I want to compete with someone for certain keywords, but is my business worth being ahead of the competition at this point?"

As well as content might be written, the moment you enter the e-commerce side of SEO the prices, delivery model/costs company reputation etc come into play a lot more than in the service industry. Especially if the product you're selling is the same one your competitor is selling. How many different ways can you describe a product?

My point here is the better the business model you are following the more likely people are to use your site than your competitors and in time you'll beat them in the SERPs. You should still put effort into generating content and building links but it will be easier if user experience on your site outclasses that of your competitors.

Hope this helped

That's exactly what is happening to us, is there ANY way at all to block our site from appearing in a certain country completely?