Expanding Your Web Business Overseas Pt2

This is a continuation of the post Expanding Your Web Business Overseas Pt1 – Determining Which Country to Conquer Next

How to Rank Well Overseas

Now if you missed my post on ensuring local search engine rankings, be sure to read it as it will first help you get local search engine rankings. What I would like to discuss now though is some tips on how to rank better overseas while still keeping in place your local ranking strategy.

The first thing to consider would be if it is worthwhile or feasible to purchase the country specific Top Level Domain (TLD, i.e .com.au, .co.uk etc.) for the country, if it is then you could probably just follow the steps on ensuring local search engine rankings and you will have no trouble. However, if it isn’t feasible you have the following options:

Country Specific Subdomain or Subpage: By simply adding a country specific subdomain (i.e. au.domain.com, us.domain.com) or subpage (i.e. domain.com/au, domain.com/us) you can improve the chances of that page being picked up by the search engines in that particular country you’re targeting.

Include Overseas Address: If you have an address overseas in the country you’re targeting, including it in your websites contact details will be beneficial.

Obtain Country Specific Backlinks: Seeking out relevant backlinks from websites which are specific to the country you’re targeting will help improve your rankings in that country. To find these websites just visit the geo-specific Google and do a search with your websites keywords to see what results come up. For example if you want to rank well in the UK search Google.co.uk and consider pages with the TLD .co.uk.

Use Country Specific Keywords: Try and use keywords on your website that a relevant to the particular country you are targeting. Such as the actual country name, cities, towns, landmarks, etc. These keywords will also have great affect if they are included in the anchor text of the backlinks you receive from the country specific websites.

Once you have implemented the strategies and given it some time you can check your rankings by again searching in the respective search engines (i.e United Kingdom is google.co.uk or Australia is google.com.au), you can have a look at the GEOTarget tool at SEOmoz. Or you can just wait till you receive a whole bunch of new traffic from that country.