After one week of tweaking this site and one week after Oscar Carreras started his off site activities to his page (in all fairness we need to say that he temporarly paused his link building activities to see how long it takes for the page to go down) here are the results:

Oscar Carreras on www.seobloom.com

my main landing page is well indexed in all the monitored version of Google but despite I made some changes to the content is not been visited by Googlebot since the very first time (9 Feb 2010). The website is ranking with an archive page (in google.com and google.co.uk) or with the correct page (google.co.uk page from UK). The Home Page is not ranking anymore in Google. New Entry: Yahoo! WOW! I am ranking with the correct landing page in 5th position in Yahoo! and in 2nd (second!) position in Yahoo! UK. Impressive!

• google.com: 3rd page, position 21 (was 22nd, gained 1 position from last week woop woop)
  
• google.co.uk: 2nd page position 15 (No variations from last week)
• google.co.uk pages from uk: 1st page position 7th (despite the site is hosted in Italy) (No variations from last week)
• yahoo UK 1st page position 2 (new entry)
• yahoo.com 1st page position 5 (new entry)

Davide Corradi on www.europeanseo.org

Oscar Carreras is losing positions in Google: his site is not ranking anymore with his landing page but with another page in Google.com and is ranking in the second page of google.co.uk (we need to say that he wrote an article about what he did so that my name appears in more than one page and, at least in one of them, in some key areas such as title tag, heading 1 etc). Similar to me he made his first appearance in Yahoo! in quite a good position.

• google.com 2nd page, position 13 (was 9th, lost 4 positions from last week)
  
• google.co.uk 2nd page, position 13 (was 7th, lost 6 positions from last week)
  
• google.co.uk pages from uk: not ranking (the site is hosted in US)
• yahoo UK 1st page position 9 (new entry)
• yahoo.com 2nd page position 14 (new entry)

Both the pages are still not indexed in Bing which is something really disappointing.

First week takeways:

On page techniques are giving more consistent results. Off page activities are powerful but need to be constantly performed. Your competitors will take advantage and overtake you if you stop. Don’t.

My website is a .com hosted in Italy but is ranking well in Google.co.uk (page from UK): this make me think that Google is deciding the location of a website using these 3 criteria (in order of importance):

• Google Webmaster Central Geographic target
• TLD
• Hosting Location

Google is giving too much lots of weight to Social Media. One of this spam site retwitting services republished a tweet about this competion and now is ranking for my targeted keyword higher than my original page!

It seems that Yahoo! gives lots of weight to On Site elements: I frankly found my current ranking exagerated but that’s something to consider and monitor with attention. I wonder if next week we’ll see different results…

Bing: helloooooooo! it’s been one week dudes!

Next update tuesday 24th of February. Can’t wait…

Quick Note: After literally 3 minutes I’ve published this post I jumped up in position 18 in Google.com: Google is bloody quick!!

Quick Note #2: Different Google datacenter in the same geographic area are giving pretty different results (up to 4 or 5 position difference).

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1 – Content
Be sure that your content is correctly localised. This is the first and basic action to take. If your content is not localised your chances to rank in a local search engine are really little. In some case are equal to zero. The difference between “Translation” and “Localisation”, duplication issue and other content related factors will be the subject of another post.

2 – Title tag
Page title is of paramount importance for the search engines to understand the subject addressed in your web pages. This is even truer if we are talking about multilingual websites. Be sure the title tag of each page of your website is targeting unique localised keywords.
Some languages have some specific requirements: if for titles written in western languages is widely accepted the limit of 69 characters, for some languages using double bytes characters (eg Chinese) this limit should be considerably less, around 35 characters. As usual, make sure your important keywords occur early in the page title.

3 – Description Meta Tag
A good description is likely to appear in the search engine snippet: Be aware that a copy that may works well in one geographic location may not work as well in another. it’s important to catch the attention of your local potential visitors: different cultures may require different writing styles.

4 – Language Meta Tag
Not the most important factor to consider in your on-page optimisation but one of the easier to implement.
eg: page in English in UK:
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Content-Language” CONTENT=”en-GB”>
Here is a listing of the ISO 639 2 letter language codes

5 – TLD/Sub-Domain/Sub-Folder
Probably the most frequently asked question ever about multilingual SEO.
There are basically 3 different possibility to indicate the geolocation of your site:

• Local TLDs (Top Level Domain: .it, .co.uk, .cn etc)
• Sub Domains
• Sub Folders

Which one is the better? There are different factors to be considered:
- with the Sub Domains or Sub Folders solution you have the possibility to concentrate your link building campaign on one main domain (normally .com).
- The local TLDs gives you a considerable advantage in penetrating a local market. Personally I find more effective this second solution.
In case you are going for the Sub Domain or Sub Folder solution remember to specify the geographic location in the Google Webmaster Tools.

6 – Geo Selector
No matter if you are using a local TLD, a Sub Directory or a Sub Folder solution: having a cached, crawlable Geo Selector it’s a must. Try plain text links instead of images and javascript. Cookies based Geo Selectors where you have different languages sharing the same urls or system that automatilcally detect and select your language are really not the way to go.

7 – Hosting Location
Quoting Vanessa Fox:
“For domains that are not country-specific (such as .com or .tv), search engines use the geographic location of the server where the site is hosted to determine country”. No need to add anything.

8- Localised Files Name
It is a best practice to localise and possibly to insert some localised keywords in the files name with some important exceptions: you got to take into account that writing urls with Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic characters many people using non-Chinese or non-Arabic non-Cyrillic keyboards will not be able to use your website.

9 – Local Contact Information
whenever is possible include in your website a physical local address and a local contact phone numbers. Search engines might use this information to determinate the area you are targeting.

10- Local Incoming Links
All links are good, some links are better.
On Site optimisation is important but Inbound links from local TLDs website or directories would increase the overall prominence of the site and would give it a competitive advantage in that particular local market
To find out how many links are coming only from a particular TLD you can use the expression:
link:your website site:.TLD

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