By Alan Webb

Being an Englishman living and working in Germany, the search engines strategies conference in London was an excellent excuse for me to get back to my homeland. Of course, the pull of visiting my land of birth was not the only reason I attended. As an experienced SEM I knew there wouldn’t be a great deal I would learn from the conference. Nevertheless, the joy of these conferences is that you get to present questions and get answers from decision makers from the search engines themselves, rather than third hand rumors which tend to propagate on forums. If you can read between the lines you can pick up the direction search engines are going in and the main benefit is you can get confirmed what you have most likely long believed to be fact which makes the registration fee worth paying in itself.

I was very happy to see Matt Cutts from Google and Ron Verheijen from Yahoo!/Overture who both have influence in their respective companies rather than just some high management sales representatives. The quality of guest speakers was also of a very high standard.

This wasn’t my first SES conference as I also attended the Germany SES conference held in Munich, where I had speaking slot on identifying keywords. It is fair to say that the London conference was on a much larger scale than the Munich version and it was clear that many visitors had flown in from throughout Europe with many languages being spoken in the foyer and corridors. The UK and Ireland is a little way behind the US in search engine marketing but in my opinion leads Europe as far as SEM is concerned.

I attended both days of the conference and chose those seminars that for myself would be the most interesting. My focus being on organic search listing and less on pay per click/pay for inclusion. I will be trying to focus in this write up on what was new or confirmation of aspects that are believed to be true but where small doubts occur. The first seminar I attended was the “Domain Name Issues” seminar…

Day 1
=====

Domain Name Issues
===============

I attended this seminar, moderated by Danny Sullivan (Editor searchenginewatch.com), as I wanted confirmation of my own observations that unlike a couple of years ago, where the general consensus amongst SEOs was to have separate folders for different languages on the same site, that it was now better to have separate domains with the language/country specific top level domains for the different language content. My own site suffers currently from this as I have an /en/ directory which caters for my English pages. Good when I did it, bad now!

It doesn’t however stop at just changing the TLD (top level domain such as in my case .de) There are three other considerations which were pointed out Robin Hislop (Spannerworks) and Ren Warmuz (Trellian) who were the speakers. The language on the page is important. Defined not only by the Character set but the content itself. Other factors for determining regional relevance from the search engines are the IP address. That is of course the IP address of the website. This means you may need to find a web host in the country you are targeting. Where the links are coming from also logically help to define region/language. So you need links from sites in the language you are targeting.

For my website which is a .de domain with an English language section in a /en/ directory I should theoretically be doing the following…

Find a web host in the US and/or UK to register my .co.uk / .com pages. Making sure there are no trademark violation issues first.

Move the English language content from my German tld /en/ directory to the uk/com domains. Change the .co.uk content to be more in line with the uk market (avoiding duplicate content and helping conversion by specific Geo targeting). If I have a .com then change the content to be more US focused.

Use 301 moved permanently in my .htaccess on the .de domain to make sure that there is search engine friendly redirection to the English language websites (.com or .co.uk) (Never use meta refresh or JavaScript redirection).

Persuade all those linking to my old /en/ folder to switch to the new .co.uk domains / .com domains.

A lot of work really, but it would certainly help my rankings for the English language keywords I want to target. I do very well indeed for the German terms, it’s the English terms I’m not doing well on and the reasons why were confirmed in the first seminar I went to (not an English language tld, hosted on a German server, more German sites linking in than English language sites).

A good start and thanks to Robin and Ren for the confirmation. I have a lot of work to do!

< Next >