I have recently been on the hunt for good solid International SEO information. As strange as it is, there isn’t really a great deal anywhere out there. I have acquired some solid information from SMX Advanced conference – great sound advice here!

From what I can glean, it appears that outside of hosting, language meta and ccTLD the same basics apply. In fact, you can rank real well in some countries as they are pretty much light years away in terms of SEO application. Location is very important, optimize for local people first, then all the other search engines will follow (and there are many other search engines out there besides the known top 3).

To summarize here are some key points when optimizing internationally…

1. From a search engine perspective, it is always best to use a ccTLD. If a ccTLD is not possible, then consider using a subdomain. It is not advisable to use subdirectories for international sites or language-specific sites.

2. Make sure your pages identify what language they are in, e.g., meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”jp”

3. Search engines do use the location of the web server when determining where a site’s content is relevant to from a local search perspective. Since local search is a major part of many sites’ campaigns and it is estimated that close to 40% of all queries have some local search intent, it’s very wise to host in the country!

4. On Page HTML Site map – Include office locations, as these are spiderable and will ensure each country office will be located.

5. Localization is very important in certain markets, i.e. China, Korea, Russia, Japan.

If anyone outside of the U.S. has any perspective or ideas, please free to share any comments or knowledge.