International SEO is the art of making sure that your site ranks well in countries and languages where you actually do business. Common signals used to target your site are ccTLDs (which indicate what country a site is based in) and hreflang tags (which indicate language and sometimes region when a language varies by region).
Below you'll find the most recent posts from the Moz Blog. In addition, we've selected a few quality resources that deserve particular attention.
Learn About International SEO : What are the factors that influence international SEO rankings? Our free learning center gets you started in the right direction.
The International SEO Checklist : Dot all the "i"s in "international" with this handy checklist from Aleyda Solis.
The Guide to International Website Expansion: Hreflang, ccTLDs, & More! : If you're expanding your online business into international markets—or audiences—this is the guide you need.
How to Build Links for International SEO : You probably need links to rank with international SEO, but getting those links can be a different game. This webinar from Aleyda Solis shows you the basics.
International SEO Best Practices : Want a quick introduction to the basics of international SEO? Find all the terminology and technical considerations in our learning center.
If you're trying to figure out exactly what hreflang will and will not do for your sites, this post (complete with examples of hreflang implementations from several major brands) should help set things straight.
Our experience in managing online Hispanic marketing campaigns for clients has taught us that when creating Spanish translations of a site, it is critical that three pitfalls be avoided in order to ensure that this effort is successful.
You may be surprised to know that some large international brands are ranking in the wrong countries, all because they don't correctly use the hreflang annotations. With this new tool, you can be sure you're using the right ones for your international pages.
When expanding your web presence to include international audiences, you're faced with a new set of challenges. In this post, MozCon 2013 speaker Aleyda Solis offers 40+ tools to help your marketing reach farther than it ever has before.
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Aleyda shares her International SEO Checklist, with a step-by-step guide to everything from assessing the international SEO potential to targeting an international audience and the development of an internationally targeted site. Dig in!
Expanding internationally is one of the advantages of having a web-based business. However, international expansion in our industry tends to be few and far between. In today's post, Aleyda Solis debunks three of the most common misconceptions in having an international web presence.
I came in one Monday morning to find the most awful thing an SEO can experience... rankings suddenly switching from .co.uk to international domains across every major generic and brand term in Google UK. This particular client had dominated their own brand and major generic terms in the UK for as long as I can remember and now, somehow their Irish, US (.com) and New Zealand sites were ranking in Google UK, and the .co.uk was nowhere in sight... WTF?!
These days, product or marketing managers are often given ridiculously short deadlines to do multilingual product launches – everything from websites, to compliance documentation, to manuals, to brochures and marketing materials. And it’s all needed yesterday in a dozen or more languages. International SEO is part of this, but remains just that: part of a larger whole.
Last week's Mozinar on foreign language SEO offered stellar advice for localizing and/or translating your site content to reach customers you wouldn't reach otherwise. Today, Zeph Snapp is back to share more tips and answer Q&A from the Mozinar.
International SEO is on the rise for many reasons not solely related to SEO. Many companies are making expansion in the international market one of their main goals. In this post, I try to solve the possible doubts you may have about this facet of your job as an SEO, explain best practices, give some tips, and explain why companies should invest more of their budget in competing in the foreign arena.
You may have already written off multilingual SEO and localization as practices that belong to global brands. "I don't need to worry about other languages", you explain, "our customers all live within the United States!"
Can you say Google in Chinese? Do you know which social network dwarfs Facebook in Japan? Climbing the search engine rankings can seem a big enough challenge in English, without considering other languages. But optimizing your site for a multilingual audience can reap big rewards, by taking advantage of growing, relatively untapped markets.
This weeks free tool is one that allows you to automatically download a list of backlinks to any URL, broken down not only by TLD/subdomain but also by the language the page is written in (using code from Google's Chrome browser). Great for analysing your own international sites, or as part of your competitor research.
When it comes to international SEO (especially within EU) there are many questions and myths. One of the myths I have heard most often is that you shouldn't use Special characters in domain names or URLs, since the search engines can't understand them. This is however of cause a false statement.