If I wanted to show up in the rankings for one of Google's international search engines (for example: www.google.fr or www.google.ca), what changes should I make? I know that I should start getting links with that country's name in the keyword (for example: "france lawyers" or "canada weight loss"). But what other specific strategies should I use? Assuming that my sites are based/hosted in America.
actually targeting those keywords would be counterproductive. canadians are not searching for "canada weight loss" they are searching for "weight loss" on google.ca or google.com (just to give an example) if you are targeting a specific market like canada you really need to have the ccTLD and then get local links.
That's a good point. I had not thought of that. I was just thinking that if I targeted geographical city included keywords, "Toronto weight loss" for example, I would start showing up in local searches done by people in Toronto. So what you are saying is that I need to get links from sites that are based/hosted in Canada, if I want to show up in Canada Google search engine. Am I correct?
the location of your hosting and your TLD should help. Besides that just do backlinks normally thats what I do and it works fine.
If you have the ccTLD such as .ca you will automatically show in Google Canada. You can also feature a Canadian address on your pages.
So if we need to market the site in geographical areas such as UK, France, GErmany, BElgium etc..do we need to have separate websites having ccTLDs for the respective countries?
Not necessarily, it depends on your target market. If English visitors are your primary market, you can have .com then translate the content and publish it on sub-folders or subdomains on the same .com That way you consolidate your marketing efforts and only have 1 site. With that said, you can rank more easily getting a ccTLD if your primary market is a non-English market so it really depends on what your primary goal is.
Collect links from that extension of domain for which country you target. As example if you target "france lawyers" in google.fr then you need to collect back links from .fr domain extension. it much helpful to get ranking.