Anyone here doing SEO for multiple country, multiple language websites? Seems to me that you might not need separate websites for every country you want to target. Example you have a French website - get it ranked in the French search engines etc. But guess what, it also ranks on Belgian and Swiss search engines (inc Google), because a lot of Belgians ansd Swiss use the French language. This concept applies to other countries sharing some of the same langauges. Seems you can save a lot of time, money and resources by leveraging one country website, for multiple country markets. Or do the benefits of 1 website per country outweigh the savings here ? What's your experience ?
You should target languages, you only need one website. I personally would use subdomains for different languages.. example... English - www.you.com Spansish - spanish.you.com French - french.you.com Again, those are just examples, you can make the sub-domain whatever you choose.
some use script to translate site content/text in different language... to support other country visitors/readers...
Make sure you find translators that translates with the proper grammer for the language yo want to translate, because they are many translators that don't do a good job on that, and nothing is worst to have visitors seeing their language screwed up on your website.
I always use subfolders when doing SEO or development on milti-language sites, such as Domain.com Domain.com/fr/ Domain.com/jp/ This way you only need to promote one site, Domain.com where with subdomains the above would be considered three seperate sites. Also as you know it's much harder to get subdomains submitted to directories and generally get links for.