Top Foreign SEO Tips That Exclude Hreflang
Hreflang SEO tags alone do not guarantee that a country-specific website will rank in its proper place.
Follow these recommendations to improve your global SEO.
Given its complexity, intricacy, and variety of applications, international optimization is undoubtedly the most complex type of SEO.
The following issues are addressed through the basic principles of SEO:
- Technical difficulties that can improve the crawlability of the site.
- Optimize content to increase keyword usage
- To increase the value of your website, get high quality links from other websites.
Since all bots must be able to crawl a site, search for relevant material, and evaluate links from other sites, most of these techniques still hold true for international search engines.
I'm aware of your thoughts. I suppose this is another article about hreflang implementation.
Wrong. I'll leave that to those who wrote about hreflang in detail.
Each country's website can have a modest advantage over other websites thanks to a few less discussed techniques.
You must first identify your target areas before you can start developing a strategy.
The next step is to choose the languages that will be available in those regions. This is important because it allows you to organize the entire project, starting with the URL structure.
Regarding global search engines:
Before discussing some of these specific strategies, it is important to understand the current state of search engines in the world.
Although Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo are the top three search engines worldwide, another US -based search engine has a significant market share abroad.
With a 71% market share , Baidu is the most popular search engine in China.
Google and Yandex are equally preferred by Russian users .
Although South Koreans prefer Google, Naver, the country's own search engine, still has about 27% of the market.
However, on a global level:
- With 1.2 trillion annual search queries and 91.4% of the market, Google continues to rule the world.
- With a global market share of 3.3%, Microsoft Bing ranked second.
- With a share of 1.5%, Yandex comes in third place.
- Yahoo! is ranked fourth with a 1.3% market share worldwide.
- China's Baidu, with 0.91% of the global market share, comes in fifth.
- As a result, while Google's international-focused improvements will benefit you in the majority of countries, there are still some external search engines that require special attention.
Baidu
Home page of China's leading search engine, Baidu
Optimizing websites for the complexities of Baidu search engine results will be critical to capturing the attention of China's massive consumer base of more than a billion internet users.
- Baidu Webmaster Tools: Create an account with Baidu and submit your website there.
- Language: Baidu and most Internet communications use Simplified Chinese as their primary language. Pinyin is a phonetic transcription of Chinese based on Latin. Pinyin is used to designate website addresses.
- Internet Content Provider (ICP) Licenses: You must comply with Chinese censorship laws in order to rank on Baidu. To do well in search engines, you must have an ICP license.
- Hosting: Baidu prefers sites located in mainland China. Fast loading speeds are preferred due to slow internet infrastructure. Fast loading times can also be facilitated by hosting in Hong Kong.
Naver
South Korean portal Naver is the first search engine designed in-house.
- Naver's preference for owned platforms and content sets it apart from other search engines. In fact, the algorithm consists of two parts, one of which assigns a "creator rank" signal that other Naver products generate.
- Naver Webmaster Tools: You must register your website. However, paid listings and user-generated content (UGC) prevail over the results.
Language: Since Naver is built in Korean, a fully translated version of the site is required.
Naver does not support Hreflang. This requires using the HTML meta tag ( <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="ko-kr"> ) in your website template as well as using the XML sitemap submitted to Naver Webmaster Tools for Korean sites and alternate versions only.
Naver Products: Naver Encyclopedia, Knowledge iN, Naver Blog, and Naver Café must be included in your plan.
1-Domain and URL of the organization
A unique country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is given to each country, such as co.UK for the United Kingdom, .ca for Canada, .com.au for Australia, etc.
The first step to achieving high rankings in country-specific search engines is to obtain a local ccTLD, as most of these search engines somewhat prefer local country-targeted websites over generic.com ones.
A common feature of search engines is the ability to filter results to “pages from country X only.” Users also find websites listed in their own country more trustworthy.
Since subdomains and subdirectories will be present on site.com, ccTLDs are preferred. Duplicate content difficulties will undoubtedly arise if identical English content is hosted on site.com for the US, UK, Canada, and Australia.
The major search engines understand that www.site.co.uk is aimed exclusively at UK users, and therefore will not count as duplicate material against www.site.com, even if it is discouraged to have duplicate content of any kind on a website.
It is always advisable to translate existing content in the same language as this may change in the future. There is no problem in copying content if it is in English, French and Spanish.
The pros and cons of each solution should be understood in relation to foreign website domains and URL formats. (Note: The data below was pulled directly from Google .)
ccTLDs (eg example.de, example.co.uk)
Pros (+)
- Clear geo-targeting
- Server location irrelevant
- Easy to separate locations
- Legal requirements (sometimes)
Cons (-)
- Expensive
- Potential availability issues
- More infrastructure
- ccTLD requirements (sometimes)
Subdomains with gTLDs (e.g. de.site.com, uk.site.com, etc.)
Pros (+)
- Easy to setup
- Can use geo-targeting in Search Console
- Allows different server locations
- Easy to separate locations
Cons (-)
- Users may not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is "de" the language or the country?)
Subdirectories with gTLDs (e.g. site.com/de/, site.com/uk/, etc.)
Pros (+)
- Easy to setup
- Can use geo-targeting in Search Console
- Low maintenance (same host)
Cons (-)
- Users may not recognize geo-targeting from URL alone
- Single server location
- Separating locations is more difficult/less visible
URL parameters (e.g. site.com?loc=de, ?country=germany, etc.)
Pros (+)
- None (Not recommended)
Cons (-)
- Segmentation based on URL is difficult
- Users may not recognize geotargeting from URL alone
- Geotargeting in Search Console is not possible
Working with multi-region websites, Google Search Central Blog
ccTLDs have long been the go-to strategy for global optimization because they are a strong indicator for Google.
However, as you can see above, maintaining each site requires a significant expenditure of money and time.
Since then, subdomains and subdirectories have gained popularity as alternative, less expensive options.
If you go this way, you'll need to take extra precautions to make sure your users are seeing the right material.
Geotargeting in Google Search Console
The geotargeting functionality in Google Search Console enables manual geotargeting of gTLDs (such as .com and .net).
Follow these steps to set up geotargeting in Google Search Console:
Select the desired location from the home page.
Click on “International Targeting” after expanding the legacy reporting and tools area in the left menu.
Select the Country tab.
You must select the target users in the box.
Choose the desired country from the drop-down list.
Click Save.
If you want to make sure your site is not associated with any country or region, simply uncheck the box and save again.
Google points out that it generally doesn't make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site are targeted to more than one country.
This is because your geotargeting settings may limit the reach of your content.
Detecting the user's IP address and user agent
The process of determining which device a person is using and serving content according to that device's best practices is known as user agent detection.
The process of identifying a user’s location and delivering content that is most relevant to that IP location is known as IP location discovery. If you do this right, there’s a good chance you’ll increase conversions, reduce bounce rates, and get consumers the information they’re looking for faster.
Since location and device can be repeatedly identified, this is a fairly typical strategy for local optimization, but it is also essential for multilingual and multi-regional SEO. Google supports HTTP and JavaScript redirects.
HTTP redirect is used.
Clients are frequently redirected using HTTP redirects to device-specific URLs. The user agent is typically used in the HTTP request headers to determine how traffic is redirected. The alternate URL provided in the sitemap or the page's rel= "alternate " tag should remain constant with the redirect.
It does not matter whether the server redirects with an HTTP 301 or HTTP status code for this purpose; however, 302 is suggested whenever available.
JavaScript switches pages
If you are having trouble implementing an HTTP redirect, you can use JavaScript to point users to the URLs that the rel= "alternate " tag points to. The client side of the redirect, which must download the page first, parses the JavaScript, then executes it before starting the redirect, which will add delay if you choose to use this strategy.
JavaScript-based redirection can be implemented in several ways. For example, you can use the matchMedia () JavaScript function to run media queries that your website already uses in link annotations on the page.
In addition to discoverability and redirection, you should ensure that your website has effective internal navigation and linking so that users can easily access pages.
"content-language" meta tag
For Google and other search engines to understand information, local language is crucial and must be carefully designed.
Language meta tags, such as the content language tag, which should be in <head></head> along with the meta description and meta keyword tags, specify the intended language of the site.
Although Google is not affected by this flag, Microsoft Bing does :
Use the "content-language" meta tag to include the document location in the <head> section of your documents:
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">
The 'content' attribute consists of a two-letter ISO 639 language code , followed by a hyphen and the appropriate ISO 3166 geographic code . For example:
• de-at: German, Austria
• de-de: German, Germany
• en-us: English, United States
• es-ar: Spanish, Argentina
Instead, include the document location either in the <html> or in the <title> element using the same format
: <html lang="en-us"><title lang="en-us">
How to Check Your Website's Country and Language in Bing , Microsoft Bing Blogs
4-Regional content
Using a separate ccTLD does not automatically make country-specific sites just copies of the main site.
Information should be translated and customized for each target country to reduce difficulties with duplicate material and to improve the user experience for local researchers.
So why don't more sites implement it?
The workflow for Adobe's content localization process is shown below, and it speaks for itself.
It requires a lot of effort, time and resources.
But the rewards are great!
Key words
There are differences in wording, spelling, and regional slang that should be used for each country-specific site even between sites that use the same language.
For example, American English and British English differ in word choice (truck vs. lorry), spelling (translation vs. translation), and regional slang (sleepy cop vs. speed bump). When creating your keyword lists for external pages, please be extra careful.
Native speakers are invaluable for providing non-native speakers with insights into local keywords that may not be obvious.
Metadata
Although each search engine gives different weights to metadata, it is recommended practice to complete metadata in a manner similar to the way you would for a US website.
The use of locally catchy terms and phrases is the only distinction.
To accurately locate body content
you must consider the localization of information in a number of contexts, such as:
- Currency exchange
- Titles
- phone numbers
- Time unit
- the weather
- Seasons
Remember to develop interesting content that someone from your target region would be interested in reading when creating or changing content to reach a foreign viewer.
Be sure to include relevant local information, such as a list of regional offices and hours of operation in the appropriate time zone.
5- Create regional backlinks
An international website should have incoming links from international websites as well. Based on the IP address, search engines can locate the website.
As a result, each country's website must contain links from that country. A new ccTLD may struggle to rank without sufficient links from a target country.
Since the site is quite new, it requires a lot of manual work to find, connect to and get inbound links.
Start building links
Start by identifying the most popular content and networks among your foreign competitors and your backlink profile.
Once you have identified your link profile and your competitors' links, use this information as a roadmap to improve your existing links and launch a link building effort to get links from those reputable sources.
Create links from relevant languages
Select relevant websites that Google ranks in the desired language (French, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, etc.).
The perceived off-page relevance of your website will grow if you are able to get high-quality links from websites that use the same language. Identify domains ending in .com, .net, etc. written in the correct language to link to for your link building efforts.
Anchor Text
There is an expanded opportunity to adopt a broader form of anchor text distribution with international SEO.
In China, a website's theme can be supported more clearly than in the US by using a wide range of keywords with similar meanings. Consider the variety of precise, partial, and general phrases in linking texts between local and English.
Register for local searches
Create a business profile for each website on Google, Bing Places for Business, and regional directories like Yandex. Join as many regional directories as you can.
Adding your company details to Yandex Business Directory costs nothing.
Links from smaller, more specialized local business directories typically have a high level of authority and credibility.
Social Indicators
Viewers feel more confident when a social media feature is localized in the target audience's language.
To improve the possibility of social interaction and sharing links across the country, register on social media portals in each region. This is a must for competing on Naver, as mentioned above.
These local links tell search engines that your site is relevant and useful to users. As a result, your efforts may result in higher rankings.