The Golden Hat

Optimizing your content to rank on a global scale is pretty daunting at first thought. Frankly, most companies don’t have the resources to even contemplate doing such a thing. Improving your chances of ranking across multiple engines in several countries and languages requires a concert of efforts. If done correctly though you can expect a step change in search engine visibility that may open up new areas of growth that you and your company had not believed possible. What types of investment are needed though to make this happen?

Firstly, you need to localize your content. Serving up English search results from landing pages written in English to Spanish speaking searchers will get you nowhere. Think in terms of what your users want and need. If they can’t understand your snippet or the content on your landing page then you’ve done nothing to serve the user, and consequently have done nothing to help your global presence. As a company you must obtain the resources to accurately translate your content. The beauty is you don’t necessarily need to translate your site into 50 different languages. About 6-7 major languages encompass approximately 90% of global searches so nailing those primary languages should be first concern. Think Italian, English, French, Chinese etc.

Secondly you need to invest in country specific top-level domains (ccTLDs). You can find a list of ccTLDs here. Search engines will, by nature, try to serve up the most relevant results. If a user in Mexico City searches for “buscar amigos” in www.google.es then the search engine will try to serve up the most relevant results, including relevancy factors such as locale and language. A ccTLD plays a major role in surfacing localized results that are relevant to users. In this case the search results would serve an overwhelming amount of results from .es TLDs. Think about it: how often do you search for something in Google.com and find English results from non .com TLDs? Google will detect your IP address, among several other variables, and serve up .com results because that is what is most relevant to a user like me searching on Google.com in an English speaking country.

Thirdly, it helps to also host your servers in the targeted country. For several companies, including web based companies, this isn’t an option. The costs and infrastructure required to host locally in several countries are substantial. I also tend to think that ccTLDs far outweigh the benefit of local hosting, so I’ll leave it at that.

To rank locally you also need a lot of links from the same ccTLD. In this case, rolling out a ccTLD will automatically generate internal link value and volume for your site from the same TLD. Regarding external links you have several options. Press Releases are a good way to go, but generally can only target a few pages to pass external links to and doesn’t support an external link effort at scale. Research local social media and directories will also help. Bottom line though, you’ll probably have to give it some time to build external links.

Lastly, you should submit XML Sitemaps per each ccTLD and validate each domain in applicable webmaster accounts, such as Google Webmaster Central. The Sitemap will assist with quick and accurate indexing by local engines will you can monitor your site performance via webmaster tools.

In sum, going global in an SEO world is a big task. Investing in the localization resources and engineering time is necessary though. Without these efforts you will not receive the search engine traffic you desire in any of your targeted countries.

Go big or go home!

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During my time spent working as an online marketing generalist I’ve been lucky enough to gain exposure to all sorts of digital marketing experiences. These experiences have contributed to what I consider the fundamentals of a good SEO career and proper SEO education. From launching websites, optimizing massive e-commerce sites for search visibility, PPC campaigning, conversion analysis, social media involvement, and the list goes on, I’ve been able to piece together thoughts about what makes someone a good SEO professional.

Since we work in an industry where formalized education does not yet exist it’s even more important that you find someone who has “been there, done that.” Sure, you can take certification exams through the major engines such as Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador and Google Certified AdWords Professional, yet they are simply tests that measure your understanding of the fundamental concepts of paid search and not a true measure of search or PPC knowledge.

Despite there not being any formalized education for search engine optimization and search engine marketing you can still find some very talented SEO professionals who have only 1-2 years of work under their belt. Based on my time in the industry and working with other knowledgeable professionals I’ve compiled the below list of skills and experience one should look for when seeking an SEO pro.

1. Experience working on e-commerce websites - large, database driven websites typically have several inherent SEO issues that are both technical and non-technical. Most e-commerce sites will have thousands upon thousands of dynamically generated URLs, layers upon layers of duplicate content, insufficient or missing content that is unique and crawlable, a disorganized site taxonomy and nomenclature, and more. What better way to learn SEO than to work on a site that throws just about every possible SEO nightmare at you?

2. Has their own blog or website - it’s one thing to take a site that already exists, make some tweaks to it, and then sit back and measure the changes in rankings and visibility. It’s something entirely different when you create a site or blog from scratch and use it as your “sandbox” for testing out what works and doesn’t work. If you want someone who is truly passionate and knowledgeable about search engine marketing then find someone who does it at home once their 9-5 is over.

3. Understands the technical and non-technical elements - no one can become an SEO expert without knowing the technical elements to search. No, you don’t need to be able to code a site from scratch or write your own search algorithms. However, you should be technically versed enough so that you can understand and communicate with the engineers who are building your sites or the search quality analyst who is refining your algorithm. Know how to create a robots.txt file from scratch, XML Sitemaps, scan source code for vital information such as anchor text, tags, alt text, identify coding languages such as JavaScript, Flash, AJAX and CSS, research and resolve status code issues with 302s and 404s, etc. All of the non-technical stuff is mostly logic driven so once you have the technical elements down then the rest should come much more easily.

4. Stresses creativity and innovation - a huge component of SEO that is often overlooked or completely ignored is innovation. How can you create viral content and syndicate it across the web? What technology can you leverage that your competitor is not? What social media can you participate with to start generating new link value and site traffic? Think multilaterally, not unilaterally and find someone with ideas that s/he is passionate about.

5. Knows black hat/spam techniques - not so they can use them on your site and game the engines for rankings, but to ensure you don’t accidentally get penalized for black hat techniques and suffer the consequences of plummeting rankings.

A few other tips that I highly recommend when hiring an SEO professional or building a solid SEO career. Definitely stay highly involved with your favorite blogs and the major search engine blogs. Constantly staying on top of recent developments and contributing your own thoughts helps with the development of your own knowledge. If you interview and SEO’er who can’t immediately tell you which blogs they follow, be suspicious of their involvement with the SEO community. Afterall, the engines and the blogs are the “classroom” for the SEO profession. An SEO professional who doesn’t read various SEO resources is like an undergraduate student who doesn’t attend class.

What else do you think makes a great SEO professional?

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I’ve been waiting for Google to release Google Chrome for a while. I think there have been murmurs and whispers about Google’s release of a web browser that would compete with Microsoft’s IE for a few years now. Much to the contempt of Microsoft, Google Chrome appears to be the web browser that most of us have been searching for and FINALLY it’s released!

The concept is simple. No surprise to any of you that have used several of Google’s products. The design lacks flash but has an abundance of usability. No surprise either. Neither should it be a surprise that the Google Chrome browser absolutely dominates all other browsers out there that currently exist (I still have love for you Firefox!). In short Google Chrome is great. Here are some reasons why:

The design and UI is simple. As a frequent browser I hate clumsy navigation and not having centralized browsing tools. As Google states it, “One box for everything.” For example, with Google Chrome a sub-navigation box opens when you begin downloading files while browsing. It looks something like this:

Firefox, which opens a second, smaller browser window that runs the download status of the files is probably the next best thing in the world of web browsers. With Firefox this was a step up from a usability perspective from IE, yet the “one box” mentality from Google Chrome really tops off the download functionality aspect of web browsing.

Google also provides a laundry list of learning center tools to teach users about the Google Chrome interface and functionality. Google certainly lives up to it’s expectedly sleek yet simple design. Go to the Google Chrome features page to view video tutorials and learn a bit more about how it works.

Let’s get down to the really cool stuff though. Chrome has a usability aspect called Google Chrome Incognito. The idea is that some web browsing should be left untracked, and cookie-less. A user can browse in Incognito mode whereby the cookies placed during that session are deleted once the browser is closed. A user can then have separate browsers open, one in standard viewing mode and the other in Incognito mode so that the browsing history stored in one browser is maintained while the other browsing information is deleted upon closure of the browser box. Google explains a bit more about Chrome Incognito here.

Google takes the UI a bit further with the bold/shaded view of the page URL. A common SEO analogy regarding URL naming is that a user should be able to cover up the screen and predict what information they will find on the screen based on the URL. Basically, the URL should be short, descriptive, keyword centric, and void of dynamic variables. Google reinforces the usability aspect of URLs by placing the domain of the URL in bold, black letters and “shading” the protocol and directories/files of the URL in a lighter, gray font. Here’s is a screen shot example that I took today:

There are several other usability improvements with Google Chrome and I suggest you check them out. In the meantime I’m going to continue browsing with it and find out exactly how all of these tools and functions work within “one box.”

Thank you Google for finally releasing this! In a recent post of mine I mentioned how Google is dominating Yahoo! in the search market share. Well, Google is drinking Microsoft’s milkshake in more than one way now with search market share dominance as well as a newly started web browser competition.

What do you think about Google Chrome?

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