SEO

You have finally decided to make the plunge and make the web design changes necessary to go after international sales. Your important web pages are ready to be created in the local language, you have looked at the aspects of the culture that are different from your own, and you need to cover the last little items.

Here are 4 web design ideas that you should follow:

1. Get your domain name in the target country

There are a lot of people that remain with the .com site, and this is respected in many countries. It is worthwhile to have the local domain when you consider the cost involved of getting a domain name and having you site hosted. You can have you country website designed so that it displays what is on your primary site if you are not ready to have 2 running site. Consider having your foreign website designed as a sales blog, pointing to you primary sales blog.

2. Make subscription options in the target language available and obvious.

RSS icons are pretty much standard in appearance, so use one. If you are not ready to have your feeds in the foreign language you can at least put the comment lines in the local language inviting people to sign up for the “English Language Feeds”. Making the offer in the local language will help you see to what point translating will be useful.

Make your subscriptions obvious, and ask for them. You should put the sign up option on each post and on the front page of your site.

3. Write articles for your niche in the local language

Knowing what your client wants and knowing your niche is the key to success on the web. Starting sales in the foreign market is a niche in itself, and you need to provide quality and useful information to that niche. If possible, deliver content in the local language. If you are writing blog entries it is entirely possibly to have them translated. You can use one of the many freelance sites on the internet to translate for you - often for as little as $2.00 per post. If you don’t want to pay for the translation, consider bringing on a person that speaks the local language as an intern or use one of the online translation tools. If you use a translation tool, include the original language after the translation and begin each post with a comment “Translated online by…”

4. Start a series of posts

The wonderful thing about having series of related posts is that it makes the reader want to come back for more. This can help get subscribers who don’t miss out on the next in the series. After you are done with the series, let it rest for a while, then email the series as part of your newsletter. Convert the series into one article that you can post online and advertise your foreign sales in the ‘author resources’ section.

Once a site is in a search engine, the search engine’s spider will revisit it and rebuild their index with the changed parts of the site. Some like to think that the spider will hit every page, but choose a very active site and look at the cached pages in the search engines and the cache dates will not be the same. A good way to encourage the search engines to hit every page it to make your site map be obvious on the site and if you can, use the sitemap that is generated by your search engine of preference. Given the choice between hoping the spider finds your cool little trick and staying with something that works - well I advise you stick with things that work.

Search engines were developed by people that know the changing (there, it just changed), so the search engines are always doing there thing with web pages. You will see a page move up, down and sometimes unexplainably vanish for different lengths of time. Although I have not experienced it personally, I have read of 2 people on different side of the US that searched a site and found it on 2 different positions of the search engine results page. This is because there is not just one server with page rank information and while one is updated right now, another will be updated in 30 minutes (Hey, there it goes again, the internet just changed).

In days of old, people were told to submit their domain to the search engines, but the search engines move so fast that a site just needs to be entered on any social media site and it will be spidered right away. I keep one video that is watched between 2000 and 4000 times a day just so I can plug in a domain name that I want spidered. So not only will every engine probably find your site on its own the first time, it will keep visiting it on its own - as long as you keep the site fresh. Update you site or the spider will stop coming to visit.

The major search engines appear to visit most pages in its database at least once a month. If a site I am working on is not spidered weekly, there is something wrong. Some pages get visited every day and a good objective for your site is to have enough content coming in that the search engines have reason to visit daily. Sites with a higher PageRank do get spidered more often than sites with a low PR. And sites which update more frequently get spidered more often than sites which does not have updates - and there is nothing wrong with an archive site that never updates.

If you have a Wordpress blog there is a tool built in that notifies the major search engines each time you make an update, it is called a PING tool. You can try to get spidered more often by updating your pages often. Minor changes are still changes, you don’t have to rewrite the site every day. There are disadvantages to changing your site daily - the first being you run the risk of human error. Make a mistake because you are making a change and you can take your site down, not a good idea.

Things That Help Page Rank:

These factors will probably change over time, once someone figures how to “beat the system”. Some these variables are more important than others:

• Keywords in the title tag
• Keywords in the description tag
• Keywords in the keywords tag
• Changing and increasing content
• Keywords in your headlines
• Keywords in your content
• Keywords in the top 25% of the page
• Keywords in the bottom 25% of the page
• Using HTML emphasis on Keywords (Bold, Italics, Underline et cetera)
• Incoming link popularity - if sites that point to you have a high PR it is a good thing
• Keywords in the names of linked pages Cover Hypnosis Expert Kevin Hogan is better than Kevin Hogan and the actual site name has the lowest value (but better than nothing)
• Keywords in alt tags and as names of images
• Getting listings in Pay-Per-Click search engines like Google Adwords or in Overture
• Listings in directories

Things That Hurt Page Rank:

• Spamming by using the same word or phrase several times in your title, meta tags, or text. Buy you new shoes from our shoe site by visiting our shoe forum and choosing from our shoe gallery! The sentence might be readable, but it is spam.
• Keyword density over 5% which may be considered keyword spamming.
• Spamming by putting words or phrases into your meta tags or title that have nothing to do with the actual content people see on your web page.
• Too many outbound links, even if they are to sites related to your topic. If you want to have hundreds of links, make a link page.
• Using text the same color as the background. Years ago, I could not figure why I landed on a site that had nothing to do with my search.
• Using tiny text (font size “-1″ or smaller) as a way to cram keywords into a page
• Linking out to link farms or free-for-all (FFA) link pages.
• Links coming in from link farms or FFA link pages
• Linking out to sites that have nothing to do with the focus or niche of your site (For a class Kevin Hogan gave in 2006 he linked from KevinHogan.com to everyone that attended his class, causing his PR to drop one point.)
• Unknown. Since we don’t know the actual algorithm used there may be things that we don’t know that hurt your page rank. If you think something may hurt your site, don’t do it.

Follow these basic rules and you will be on your way to getting your page ranked properly.

KeyWords and KeyWord Phrases are words that people will type into a search engine that YOU or YOUR PRODUCT is the answer to. When people type “Body Language”, Kevin Hogan wants to be the answer, but his site only appears at the bottom of a 100 entry list. There are over 2.1 million entries for “Body Language” (and 1.5 billion for ‘internet’). When someone enters SEO Copywriting, there are hundreds of people that want to be in the top 10, but there are only 10 sites listed.

In the beginning, keywords were not visible to the reader; they were only in the HTML script. Then people realized that in the algorithm the quantity of keywords counted. Because of this you would have pages with white text on a white background, the same word added as a comment in the HTML text (so only the spider could see it) or the same word written 300 times at the bottom of the page. These words were for the search engine spiders.

Today the tricks listed above not only don’t work; in fact the opposite - they would get your site banned from the search engines because the algorithm has changed. Today the search engines want your keywords to be used logically and where they fit. Each page should have a title (you would be surprised how many sites have all of their pages untitled). Since you are able to use a title, and each page has a KeyWord, use that KeyWord as the page title.

The “Body Language” page from Kevin Hogans’s site has this title string - . Not only does he use “Body Language” twice, he uses other words people may use to search for this topic; “Reading Body Language”, “Decoding Body Language” and “Body Language Analysis”.

After a user searches on a set of keywords on her search engine of choice, she is presented with a page called the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) which has sponsored links (at the top of the page and to the right) and a main section of the page with the listing that are found based on the algorithm used. This set of listing is called the organic or natural listings. Organic search engine optimization (this training) is about increasing the number of times the search engines spider your site, moving your site higher on the SERP, both of which should help increase the amount of visitors that your site gets.

This is achieved by getting more documents indexed on the search engine and by attaining a higher position in the organic results. The problem for many marketers and traditional advertising agencies lies in the technical nature of search engines and the difficulty in understanding the underlying algorithms that produce the rankings for particular keyword searches.

The most popular search engine is Google which accounts for the greatest number of search requests. This is not to say that other search engines are not important nor anything about the different algorithm’s being used. Google’s success has ensured that many search engines are moving in the same direction and since Google has filed their search patent we do not have to rely on as much guesswork.

Importantly, Google ensures that there is a level of feedback from users through the Google toolbar that enables Google to refine their search results over time. Also, a significant part of Google’s algorithm is to protect its search engine against search SPAM which is the use of techniques to improve a site’s rankings normally through the artificial creation of links, so we have outlined the main areas to watch out for. Since keywords are so important in SEO it is heavily recommended you get a keyword tool such as Keyword Expert or SEO Elite. This will save time and guess work, and will increase your SEO results.

Here are some things to consider if you are serious about having a higher page rank. Take the time to create or acquire original content for your site. Search engines are putting a greater lever of importance on the community aspect of the internet, so make sure you take advantage of blogs and forums. Take the time to make sure the information you post is true and not plagiarized. Not a legal obligation, but it is a moral obligation.

Page Titles

Use an original page title for each page. If you can, use your most important key word phrase as the page title.

Outgoing Links

Do not exceed 100 outgoing links, always link to good quality sites and never link to farm links. Extra tip: you must check your outgoing links on a regular basis to make sure they are still working and the quality of the sites you are linking to is still good.

Keyword Density

Keep your keyword density under 5% or it is keyword spamming. Keyword spamming can increase your listing as long as you play it carefully and pull the keywords off after you are spidered once.

Flash, Images and really cool new stuff

Skip them. If not, to be used in moderation, the make your site load slowly and there are still people out there with slow connections and no one likes watching the “loading” window. People also don’t like complicated menu setups, keep it simple.

Alt Text

If you use pictures and put your keyword in the alt thext, your alt text must describe the picture. You could write something like: “keyword header”, “keyword image” or “keyword logo”. Stuffing lots of keywords in your alt texts can work like the keyword density I mention above.

Think of your audience

Avoid slang or rude words in your copy unless that is what your audience uses. Consider that is will also get you banned, but it may get you incoming traffic.

Finally, remember that search engine algorithms change frequently. So keep up to date by browsing the SEO sites and forums.