Depending on which option you choose you can run the risk of splitting up your link equity, you might find that you’re not ranking as well as you should in local versions of Google and you might still find that your US based page is ranking above your local listing, no matter what you do.

I once heard a Google representative say that to properly geo-target your site, you just needed to set it up in Webmaster Tools. That was it. Google would work out the rest. From everything else I’ve seen, that’s not quite true.

For country specific versions of Google, I’ve found that it looks at a few things.

1. Your country specific top-level domain (.co.uk, .fr, etc.)
2. The country in which your site is hosted
3. The language used on your site (if applicable)
4. The location of the sites that link to you (their tlds, host countries, etc)
5. Your geo-targetted settings in Webmaster Tools

There’s a few ways you can use this to your advantage, if you’re designing an international site from scratch.

Use Country Specific TLDs

If you want to target the UK you can grab yourdomain.co.uk. If you’re targetting Germany, you can put your site up on yourdomain.de. This is arguably (although not definitely) the most effective, yet it’s often the least doable. It’s rare that you’ll be able to get the tlds in all of your brand names. Having said that, if you can grab them all, you have the freedom to host each domain in it’s own country. You’ll also, possibly, have a higher click-through rate (although that’s more speculation than proof) because it’s more likely that someone in the UK will want to click on your .co.uk, compared to a .com. The bad news, though, is that you’ll split up your link equity. If your US site gets 10,000 links, and your UK site gets 10,000 links, then it could be a slightly missed opportunity. You can interlink them, sure, but 10,001 links isn’t the same as 20,000 links.

Having said that, the links that each site gets will be more likely to be from the right country, so your .co.uk is more likely to attract links from other UK sites. This will, obviously, help the site rank well in Google UK.

Pros: Boost from having the country specific tld. You can host the site in the targetted country. Possibly higher CTR.

Cons: Hard to get all the domain names. You split up your links more.

Example: www.amazon.co.uk

Use Subdomains

Subdomains, such as uk.domain.com, fr.domain.com etc, have the bonus of letting you host each subdomain within the target country. That’s pretty cool. With each domain geo-targetted in Webmaster Tools AND hosted in that country, you should get a decent enough boost (if you deserve to rank) in country specific versions of Google. The drawback is that you’re again splitting up your link equity – but again, the links that you get naturally are more likely to be from sites in that country, which will help.

Pros: You can host subdomains in the targetted countries. It can be easier to manage.

Cons: You split up your links.

Example: uk.pokernews.com

Use Your Folder Structure

You could structure your site so that it uses folders, such as domain.com/uk. You can geo-target that folder to the UK in Webmaster Tools, but the drawback is that you can’t host the folders in seperate countries. You will, however, be able to use all of the links you get more effectively. Any links that the /uk site gets will significantly help to boost everything that’s on that domain, including the /fr site and the /de site. That’s a huge bonus.

Pros: The links you get will benefit the whole domain.

Cons: You can’t host the folders in their target countries.

Example: www.apple.com/uk

It’s very difficult to say which is the best structure to use, and in all honesty it often comes down to other things like the nature of the site itself, your resources and how much you’re prepared to pay, how your CMS works, whether you use load balancing, how you need to manage your files and things like that. But if you’re designing a new site, it’s always worth considering how you’re going to structure your site to get the most out of international search traffic.

(Flickr image from bytezh)

Building Your Site For International Traffic is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

This is a bad thing.

I discovered Wordpress’ love for 302s just after I wrote the post on how to make your own URL shortener in Wordpress so if you’re using this (awesome) method of shortening your own URLs, then make sure your redirects are using 301s instead of 302s. Mine weren’t, and it made Google pretty much throw up.

How Can You Tell If Wordpress Is 302ing Posts?

You can either run a server header checker and search for a URL on your domain that you know will redirect – usually something like either the www or non-www version of your domain. I also highly recommend the Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin, because it’s awesome. Run that, browse around, and it’ll show you the server headers.

How do I make Wordpress 301?

As far as I’m aware there’s no way to change this in the Wordpress dashboard normally, but the very nice people at Urban Giraffe have made a Wordpress redirection plugin which fixes it. Activate the plugin and it’ll automatically make the 302s become 301s. It also lets you do a whole lot of other stuff, which is all useful.

Apparantly Platinum SEO Pack will let you manage redirects too, although I’ve not tried it out yet.

Why Does Wordpress Do This?

I really, really don’t know. But honestly, other than this, Wordpress is the best. Let’s never fight again Wordpress.

(Flickr image from Eric M Martin)

What The Hell, Wordpress? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

I’ve been designing it on my smaller laptop screen so there’s still a few bugs and tweaks that I should really be making – if you have critical eyes and spot anything that’s not quite right with the site, please let me know in the comments on by tweeting @SharkSEO.

Cheers folks

Big Sharky Redesign is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

The RT @tweetmeme is pretty unneccessary. Tweetmeme are taking your content and attaching their brand name to it instead. This makes me sad.

The styling of the button annoys me because it doesn’t always fit into your theme. Sometimes you want your page to look how you want it to look, rather than have buttons tacked onto it, looking all green and out-of-place.

And the URL shortener is bad. If Google treats bit.ly in the same way as it treats TinyURL, then any links that get passed around because of @tweetmeme won’t give you any link juice. This is pretty much a crime.

But Here’s How To Fix All That

You can create your own URL shortener, exclusive to your blog. Easily, if you’re running Wordpress at least. You’ll be able to have URLs that look like http://sharkseo.com/go/154. Check out the Twitter icon at the top of this post , see where that links to if you hit it.

For Wordpress, create a folder within the root of your domain. Name it “go”, or something equally short. Then make a .htaccess file and include the following code:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ([0-9]+) /index.php?p=$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteRule (.*) / [R=301,L]

The easiest way to make that a .htaccess file is to post that code into notepad, save it as a .txt and then upload it to the “go” folder on your server. Then rename it to .htaccess. Windows sometimes has a bit of a tantrum if you try to change it on your machine locally.

This code basically says “Whenever the URL /go/ is accessed, and the file specified is numbered, add that to index.php?p=. If it’s not a number, go to the homepage.

Put that .htaccess file in your new /go folder.

To test that your 301s are working, open your Wordpress admin panel, go to Manage > Posts and then hover over one of your posts. You should see in the small link-to box a post number.

An earlier examples of linkbait post, for example, is number 190. Try going to http://www.yourdomain.com/go/190 (or whichever number of you found). It should redirect you to the relevant post (like here). That redirect is a 301, by the way, so all the link juice will be passed to the right page when people link to that URL. Hat tip to planetmike.com for revealing this simple but awesome tip.

Next, you’ll want to create and style your own Twitter button so that, when it retweets, it retweets your Twitter name instead of @techmeme. The good news is, you can use any image or text to retweet, it’s just a link to Twitter.

To do this, go into your theme editor in Wordpress, open up the single.php (or whichever file you’re using for your single post theme), find the button that you want to be your Twitter button, and add an a href code around it to make it a link to Twitter. Here’s the code for the link:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @yourname <?php the_title(); ?> – <?php echo get_option(‘home’); ?>/go/<?php echo $post->ID ?>”></a>

The @yourname you obviously change to whatever your Twitter username is. The <?php the_title(); ?> is simply the title of the blog post. The <?php echo get_option(‘home’); ?> is the root domain of your blog, followed by the /go/ which is your new, personalised 301ing URL shortener. The <?php echo $post->ID?> is the number of your post, so it’ll complete the URL shortened link. That will give a result, for my previous TinyURL page, as a link that looks like http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @SharkSEO TinyURL Doesn’t Pass Value – http://sharkseo.com/go/154.

And there you have it, you get to keep your brand name instead of passing out Techmeme’s. If people want to follow you from retweets, it’s easier for them. More importantly, instead of risking losing your well deserved link authority, you’ll get it all going straight to your blog. Enjoy, and don’t forget to retweet this post

(Flickr image from jenteach123)

Reclaim Your Twitter Links is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Good luck.

Check out the SEO Search Game.

Know Your SEO? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz)

I don’t know about top one, but top 3 (for the completely uninitiated) are:

1. Meta Keywords are still useful (they’re definitely not). See Meta Keywords Tag 101.
2. Keyword Density is a factor in rankings (it’s definitely not). See Keyword Usage.
3. Submitting your site to search engines is a critical part of SEO. It hasn’t been since the 1990’s, but like meta keywords, this one just won’t die.

For those who are generally smart about SEO, the ones I find most persistent are:

Click-through rate is a major part of search engine rankings. The engines have said publicly that CTR is a very noisy and un-useful signal, and not something they’d rely on.
2. The search engines penalize you if you do active/obvious SEO (they don’t). The engines themselves promote SEO best practices, and Google’s gone as far as to endorse and promote SEO events, a guide and an SEO toolset.
3. Participating in PPC campaigns (and spending more) will help you rank better in the engines (it doesn’t). The engines have very real Chinese walls between their business divisions and never let paid campaign spending affect organic rankings directly.

Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEOMoz, a Seattle based SEO company.

Danny Sullivan (Calafia & Search Engine Land)

It’s not quite a myth, but I’d say one of the biggest problems SEOs struggle with is that it is all about rankings and traffic, rather than conversions. It’s easy to keep focusing on trying to work the extremes to bring in more visitors when the time might be better spent on ensuring you’re doing better to convert your existing visitors. If you want a real myth, though, it’s that the meta keywords tag matters. It makes so little difference. Only Yahoo takes any real look at it, and even there, it’s virtually useless. Yet still, some newbie SEOs still focus on it.

Danny Sullivan heads up Internet Consulting firm Calafia and is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land.

Dave Naylor (Bronco & DavidNaylor.co.uk)

Wow so many to choose from..

“£500 one off SEO fix and your website is good forever” – SEO and search engines move forward all the time, so should you website.

“Nothing that a competitor can’t do to harm you” – There are people that make a living destroying other peoples websites

“Link Bait won’t get you penalised” – Maybe not today

Dave Naylor is a UK SEO, he runs the web design and SEO agency Bronco.

Aaron Wall (SEOBook)

The biggest SEO myth is probably that of “quality content,” especially for new webmasters creating new sites. Some believe markets are won and lost based exclusively on quality of content and quality of service, but advertisers spend $100’s of billions advertising each year to influence consumers. As search incorporates more usage data that advertising keeps seeping its way into influencing the “organic” search results. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said that the web is fast becoming a cesspool and that brands are the solution. It is hard to create a brand without an ad budget. And most markets have cliques and are dominated by nepotism and little white lies. If you want to gain marketshare you have to be a push marketer until you are near the top and have momentum pushing you along. Re-invest heavily until you run out of things to invest in.

Aaron Wall offers SEO training and is the author of SEOBook.

Patrick Altoft (Blogstorm, Branded3)

The biggest is the duplicate content penalty. People think that just because you publish the same content as somebody else you are going to get some kind of penalty, not the case at all.

Patrick Altoft writes the popular Blogstorm SEO Blog and is Director of Search for Branded3.

Michael Gray (Graywolf)

The biggest myth of SEO is that everyone is treated equally by the search engines. Small, nimble, and aggressive publishers were able to build web properties extremely quickly, and as a result they were able to pollute Google with nonsense and garbage websites. As a result Google has made it more difficult to obtain the required trust for popular and commercial keywords. This higher trust prerequisite made it much harder for people to pollute Google with garbage. However smaller business, mom & pop shops, or people who don’t have the resources to compete with big brands have become collateral damage in Google’s war on spam. The irony of the whole situation is Google is responsible for much of the spam web pollution which is
monetized with Google’s adsense product.

Michael Gray is an SEO Consultant who can always be relied on to create (sharklarking) controversy.

Big thanks to the guys that contributed, and if you know of a myth in SEO  feel free to share it in the comments.

(Flickr image from Der_Flo ☮)

What’s The Biggest SEO Myth? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

But there’s a problem with this, you could come up with something awesome. Something brilliant. And then you make it. And then people come. They see your linkbait, they link to it, everyone wins. Except obviously that’s not how it happens – how do you get people to your linkbait to begin with? I bet there’s loads of really awesome sites that have been left dormant and undiscovered for years, thousands of incredible sites that will never be seen by more than 5 people. It’s not an “if you build it, they will come” thing. Life is not like Field of Dreams. Luckily.

So here are some ways of getting traffic to your linkbait.

StumbleUpon Ads – It’s 5 cents a page view and you can specify your daily budget so you know exactly how many views your linkbait will get (in case you don’t want to crush your servers, or spend that much). Stumble has an interesting effect if your content is actually linkworthy – StumbleUsers aren’t going to make you cash directly, they won’t buy anything and they’re definitely not going to click your AdSense. Stumble users, however, are more technical than the average user of, say, Facebook. They’re more likely to have their own blog or control a site, and as such they’re more likely to give you a link if they like your linkbait. It’s also worth noting that a lot of Stumble users also use Digg, so if you’ve got a Digg button on your linkbait (and you probably should), then you might up your Digg count too.

Buy Diggs – Check out piqq.us or Wickedfire, and buy some Diggs. Make sure you only do this if your content is good, and is likely to hold it’s own on Digg. You only want to do this just enough to get your listing noticed on Digg, I recommend getting around 30 Diggs to get you noticed, 50 Diggs max. You want to get just enough Diggs to be noticed in the upcoming section, and then you if your linkbait is good enough you should get organic Diggs to see you through.

Depending on what your linkbait is (and in the case of linkbait on behalf of clients, this can work quite often) you could offer to reskin a niche forum. You’ll need to track down a suitable forum and offer to pay to rebrand their forum for a month or two. Obviously won’t work for all linkbait, but it’s an idea.

Facebook groups – Find your target audience on particular groups and seed your linkbait there, see if it takes off. It should get you a bit of traffic and might help other people spread the word a bit.

Let us know in the comments if you have any ideas for getting your linkbait off the ground.

How Can You Make Linkbait Go Viral? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

This puts Google in a slightly awkward position. They could keep this excellent source of authoritiative links NoFollowed, and miss out on having a more relevant index *or* they could remove the NoFollow on the Wiki links and risk the place becoming spamtastic again.

In truth, they’ve probably gone with option 3. Secretly following Wiki links but making them appear to be NoFollow. This helps prevent the site getting spammed, and lets Google capitalise on the authoritative links.

I’m going to finish with a quick and easy method of getting a trusted Wikipedia account. If you’ve got a trusted account, it’s easier for you to sneak in a few well placed links of your own.

1. Search Google for common spelling mistakes

2. Search Wikipedia by searching Google for site:en.wikipedia.org “spelling mistake” -intitle:talk -intitle:user

3. Fix the spelling error, make sure you’ve selected “This is a minor edit”

4. Repeat over time

In time you’ll have an account that’s build up a history of fixing errors. Easy.

Does Wikipedia Pass Juice? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?