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How to develop country specific links?

Discussion in 'Link Development' started by pcz, Jul 18, 2008.

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  1. #1
    The title says it: How to develop country specific links?

    I have a Romanian site. Should I only submit it to Romanian directories or are international sites/directories/social bookmarking sites good as well?
     
    pcz, Jul 18, 2008 IP
  2. kewlchat

    kewlchat Well-Known Member

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    #2
    Domain names
    It might not be an option if you already have the domain but for new sites that are targeting both a local and global audience its worth getting a country specific domain name such as .co.uk. This is for a search engine the equivalent of a neon sign in terms of giving it a hint as to which country your targeting. This advice also includes guys over the pond in the US while many think the US has exclusive rights to use .com domain names the .us TLD (top level domain) has been in use for a while, given the new emphasis on local search it may be worth thinking about using a US specific domain name. Most (but not all) require a business or individual to be a resident of that country to buy a domain name, and each country has a naming authority in the UK this is Nominet and it is these companies that set the rules.

    Language
    Probably the most overlooked aspect of optimisation for a specific country is telling Google the language your pages are using, given that the XHTML standard allows you to declare language in both the HTML tag and through meta tags lets take an example of French


    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="fr">
    <head>
    <title>The title</title>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
    …

    Alternatively if not using XHTML1.1 you could use a meta tag…

    <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="fr">

    Now the first is more semantically correct, but the second method is more flexible and allows you to be able to select multiple languages for a page.



    Both however can supply almost any language including en-GB for British English, now why its not default I’m not sure but oh well. Now language alone is not going to help with anything other then basic guidance after all you can have a guest house in Scotland with visitors coming from Germany who you wish to be able to book via your site!

    Location, Location, Location
    The simplest method is to tell Google where your site is based, most companies have an ‘About Us’ or ‘Contact Us’ page, which as part of good practices should include a postal address anyway, one of the most common faults is to fail to include the country (I know it sounds daft, but yes I agree you better go check your now ), a second useful nugget for a search engine is a longitude and latitude of your business and therefore your site, now it may seem odd including this detail on an About Us page but it can be explained away as simply to aid those with satellite navigation systems - and you never know it could be true.
    When formatting addresses you have a couple of choices the address tag and or Adr.
    The address tag is one of those tags that over the years has had many meanings and is currently under dispute however it is reported that Google interprets anything within the address as a physical address, so

    <address>
    My House
    Some street
    Some where
    United Kingdom
    post code
    </address>

    However my preferred option is to use a Adr which is a microfomat, a microformat is an agreed use of certain tags in particular div or span to provide semantic meaning, it may not currently be used specifically by search engines but it is search engine friendly as well as human friendly and easy to style.

    <div class="adr">
    <div class="street-address">My House</div>
    <div class="extended-address">Some street</div>
    <span class="locality">Some where</span>,
    <span class="postal-code">post code</span>
    <div class="country-name">United Kingdom</div>
    </div>

    Adr works well when combined with 2 other microformats Geo and Hcard, Geo is a location aware microformat which is a fragment from the vcard definition.

    <span class="geo">
    <span class="latitude">37.386013</span>,
    <span class="longitude">-122.082932</span>
    </span>

    Hcard, is an XML/XHTML variant of the Vcard and when combined with Adr & Geo provides semantic information about an individual and or business along with locational information.

    Keywords
    This one goes without saying, using variants of a country name as keywords will help ranking, so in the case of Tim Nash the IT consultant, using anchor text such as Tim Nash a UK IT Consultant would be preferable. Remember country names will be more effective then town names, there are multiple Bostons’, Yorks’, and Washingtons’ out there but only one France for example.

    Back links
    Finally back links from the country your targeting, getting these back links provides authority and trust, particularly if they are in your subject area, when marketing a country specific site, try country specific directories and look for those in your field with similar interests who are local.

    Hopefully this advice will help those who are struggling in getting ranked in their countries search engines.
     
    kewlchat, Jul 18, 2008 IP
    pcz and Alex-Z like this.
  3. mixke

    mixke Prominent Member

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    #3
    Buying them, trading links, offering some deal are the only ways that I'm aware of....let's see what others have to suggest. Probably some 'free' ones ;) :)
     
    mixke, Jul 18, 2008 IP
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  4. pcz

    pcz Well-Known Member

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    #4
    wow great posts. These will help me :)
     
    pcz, Jul 18, 2008 IP
  5. globestar

    globestar Guest

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    #5
    Looking for specific extensions may help? .ca is canada etc
     
    globestar, Jul 18, 2008 IP
  6. michaelsoni

    michaelsoni Guest

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    #6
    Try to do off page optimization in the country specific directory, you must get traffic related to that specific country.
     
    michaelsoni, Jul 18, 2008 IP
  7. Alex-Z

    Alex-Z Peon

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    #7
    Nice posts, particularly kewlchat's (rep given).
    But back to pcz's specific question, how do you actually develop country specific links?
     
    Alex-Z, Jul 21, 2008 IP
  8. Qryztufre

    Qryztufre Prominent Member

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    #8
    regional directories will certainly help, as will social bookmarking sites. Though you should also try posting on forums under your given language and domain, blogs should help as well. Find resource sites that are under your region and submit your site to them, get your local friends to talk about you to their friends. Even try to get local news places to get a link to you... most of the resources on the net are in english, so getting one in your own language should be a little easier then all of us are finding in the US.

    ANY link helps though, so it would do you well to keep that in mind, just focus on your region.
     
    Qryztufre, Jul 21, 2008 IP
    Alex-Z likes this.