Hi I would need to relocate back to Europe and I want to take my online business and adapt it to the European market. I will need to translate the site to two other languages and I was wandering how can I best promote websites to specific Countries? Perhaps list in specific regional directories? Or get links from sites that have the same topic and language? And if I acquire an inbound link to my site on English will it increase the PR of the Lets say German part of my site? Do I need to make subdomais for each languages? I would like to hear ideas and opinions on how could I promote my website on search engines to English and German speaking audience from a country in the heart of Europe?
you may buy xxxxx.de for germany or xxxxxx.at for austria and try to get those .de and .at or whatever TLD domains
Your first move should be getting a European host for the site. If you wish to have different languages subdomains are a good idea but they are not its not essential to have them on subs. Also submitting to European directories is a good idea and trying to establish backlinks from other European sites. Good luck with the transition to Euroland
I'll agree from what I have seen. I have worked on several .com & .net names that rank very high in Europe.
Thanx all for the reply. So if I want to translate my English language website to two other languages that would mean I will have three different Home pages on three different languages right? Should I put each different languages to different sub domains? And each sub domain should have a different domain name on the corresponding language? If I get a link from a US based website on English will it affect the pr of my German part of my site? Lots of dummy questions I know. Thanks for reading Laz.,
Looking at some other sites I am seeing they use sub domains for the different languages site up like this: site.com/ site.com/fr site.com/de and so on.
Yes I have noticed the same thing. Like for example: http://fr.yahoo.com/ and http://de.yahoo.com/ However I am wondering about my shopping cart and the database issues. I don't know, do you think I will have to create new products databases for each languages and also have to make the shopping cart work with each different languages and the corresponding databases? Thankx Laz.
I really dont have experience with shopping carts so I cant really advise you on that point. My personally thought is that your site would look more friendly if the shopping cart was in different languages. Sorry I couldnt be of more help
Would it not be easier to adapt your database to hold the various languages for each item in the same record? Then you only have to have one product code and one DB to administer. Building separate DBs is going to cause you all sorts of problems down the road with keeping everything in sync. Changing the language on the cart and the like should just be a matter of localising your templates I would think and serving the correct template to the visitor. Ranking well in country specific SERPs can be greatly helped by either using the TLD for that country or physically hosting your site in that country (or both). Also bear in mind that if you are going to have multiple languages that your keywords may change (based on language) and you may have to do quite a bit of SEO work to rank for the new language keywords. Of course this depends on what your selling I suppose.
why not chose an .eu domain? .com is more likely for US... i would set the main homepage in english on domain.eu and for the other languages i'd chose subdomain.domain.eu this is just an idea...
Just curious - have you promoted any .eu doamins? I seen some discussion about how .eu doamins rarely if ever appear in the SERPs. Just wondering if you have any experience on this? Rgds Richard
Not even the once. Cant tell if this is because no one promotes them or if there is some bias in the SERPs. I think I'll have to do a bit of testing.
my country is not in EU yet so i can't buy an .eu domain yet i don't think there is any problem with indexing .eu domains, see http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3A*.eu&btnG=Google+Search i've never read it anywhere, but it would be logical as an .eu domain to be European equivalent of an American .com domain or German .de domain, etc... so google should consider it and give better results... i hope you understand what i mean
Yep indexing seems to be no problem but just wondering whether .eu domains are being returned in the SERPs? I wonder how Google will geotargets .eu domains - what country's SERP does a .eu belong to? Will they only use hosting location?