Your Guide to Multilingual and Multiregional SEO

One of the signs that your SEO service is taking the right course is your grip over multilingual and multiregional SEO. It is true that majority SEO Companies focus more on English language SEO tactics, but the fact remains that if you want to reach out to a wider audience you need to cater to the local languages and requirements of the regional markets as well.

In this blog post we bring you a very comprehensive guide to multilingual as well as multiregional SEO. Before getting to know what exactly goes into this kind of SEO, let us understand both these terms in detail.

Multilingual SEO: 

Multilingual means ‘multi/ many languages’. Multilingual SEO consists of optimizing web content in a variety of languages, so that the web content can reach out to a variety of linguistic audience.

Multiregional SEO: 

This deals with optimizing the website content in such a way that it performs well in various geographic locations.

How to start?

The best way to start is to know who exactly is your target audience and which geographical location do they belong to?  This in fact is the stepping stone of multilingual and multiregional SEO. Once you are clear on this point, it becomes very easier for you to come up with the right SEO strategy.

Select an URL structure and Domain

Now that you are clear about your target audience, the next thing which you need to take care of is the URL structure as well as the Domain name.

As per Google’s Official Webmaster Central blog, it is difficult to determine geo targeting on page by page basis. Thus it is better to use an URL structure which makes it easy to segment parts of the website for geo targeting.

You can choose cc TLDs URL/ Domain structure as it helps in performing clear geo targeting. At the same time CC TLDs are expensive and require good amount of infrastructure. If this is not what you want, then you can go for either subdomains with gTLDs or subdirectories with gTLDs. They are low maintenance, easy to set-up and use Webmaster Tools geo targeting.

Server Location

There are many who think that the location of the server is very important for the multilingual and multiregional SEO. But Google recently made it clear that it does not rely on the server location alone. Thus with adoption of new technologies, the location of the server is no longer that critical as it used to be in the past.

Other SEO factors to be considered

IP Location Detection: This is the process of detecting the location of a user and delivering content based on what is more relevant for that IP location. If the IP location detection practice is implemented efficiently the visitors will get to see what they are looking for which will lead to lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates.

Useable Content

Always use content which is useable and provides information which the users’ are looking for. The content of the website becomes all the more crucial when you wish to target an international audience.

Translation

A very important element of multilingual and multiregional SEO, translation plays a role which should never be ignored by SEO experts and content writers. See to it that you opt to intelligent translation services rather than going for the literal translation.

          These are the basic tenants of multilingual and multiregional SEO. Though international SEO is a heavy task, we are sure if you follow the above given tenants, your SEO services will reap outstanding results.

Boost Your Business Using SEO & PPC

What Is SEO? Learn More about SEO & PPC:

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

What Is PPC?

PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. 

             Essentially, it's a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically. Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC.

 SEM(Search Engine Marketing):

One of the best strategies to boost your Business through search engine marketing (SEM), is through a cooperation of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC). Both SEO and PPC drive traffic to a website through keywords. They also match the user’s intent with the content on the page and thereby act as a dynamic pair.

 Now if we look at the differences between these two channels, then one of the major differences is the sphere of ‘time’ taken to provide the expected results. While SEO takes considerable time to achieve the results, the results provided by PPC are immediate. And it is this point, which you can take advantage of SEM. The time advantage gained through PPC can be used as insights for developing better SEO. You can analyze the multiple headlines on PPC and get a metrics which will help you come up with better and effective titles as well as content for your article and web pages.

On other hand, the creation of better content in SEO provides PPC with an improved number of landing pages, thereby helping end-user. Once you know which content is most SEO friendly, then you can grow your PPC campaign severely and get better results. Often it is seen that the PPC campaigns are not producing the expected results at all – and the criminal is poor content metrics in SEO. Thus in order to improve your SEM it is important that you monitor the content metrics in SEO. This will also help you determine when you have to launch the PPC campaigns.

It has been seen that both paid search and organic listing is mutually beneficial. Once your company is displayed on the results of both of these channels, it builds trust and goodwill in the minds of the user. Thus you can appeal visitors on your site through the messaging of both channels. This way you can turn your SEM into a dynamic one. Whether you have just launched your website or your website is already functional for some time, it is recommended that you use both these channels to get fruitful results. With competition being fierce, it is crucial that your website ranks high in the search engine results. Power your SEM with the dynamic qualities of SEO and PPC and experience an increase in traffic on your website and better conversion rates. This way, not only will you get an effective SEM, but rather you will master the art of dynamic search engine marketing.

How to Setup a 301 Redirect in PHP, Apache, ASP

The “301 Permanent Redirect” is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for redirecting websites. You can use it in several situations, including:

• to redirect an old website to a new address

• to setup several domains pointing to one website

• to enforce only one version of your website (www. or no-www)

• to harmonize a URL structure change

 header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");

header("Location: http://www.newdomain.com/page.html");

exit();

?> 

if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != 'www') {

header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');

header('Location: http://www.'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']

.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

}

?>

RewriteEngine on

rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]

rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc] 

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"

Response.AddHeader='Location','http://www.new-url.com/'

%> 

If InStr(Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME"),"www") = 0 Then

Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"

Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www."

& Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST")

& Request.ServerVariables("SCRIPT_NAME")

End if

%>

 I am going to describe several ways to setup 301 redirect, below i will cover the most used ones:

PHP Single Page Redirect:

In order to redirect a static page to a new address simply enter the code below inside the index.php file.

<?php




PHP Canonical Redirect:

The Canonical 301 Redirect will add (or remove) the www. prefixes to all the pages inside your domain. The code below redirects the visitors of the http://domain.com version to http://www.domain.com.

<?php




Apache .htaccess Singe Page Redirect:

In order to use this method you will need to create a file named .htaccess (not supported by Windows-based hosting) and place it on the root directory of your website, then just add the code below to the file.

Redirect 301 /old/oldpage.htm/new/http://www.domain.com/newpage.htm




Apache .htaccess Canonical Redirect:

Follow the same steps as before but insert the code below instead (it will redirect all the visitors accessing http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com)

Options +FollowSymlinks




ASP Single Page Redirect:

This redirect method is used with the Active Server Pages platform.

<%




ASP Canonical Redirect:

The Canonical Redirect with ASP must be located in a script that is executed in every page on the server before the page content starts.

<%