by 
Richard on February 6, 2008
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.
by Richard on February 2, 2008
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.
