1.    Website Content

• All content should be written in the targeted language in the commonly spoken dialect of each country. Translations are NOT as effective as rewriting text from scratch.
  • New keywords should be allocated to each page written in the new language. Often, keywords’ meanings change with each language.
  • The physical address of the company should be listed on a dedicated page or on the contact page. Ideally there should be an address for each country that is to be targeted.

2.    Keyword Research

• Keyword research should be done using Google Adwords in each language separately.
  • Keyword research should be carried out with the help of a native speaker.
  • Translations of keywords sometimes miss local slang which can provide better search results based on search volumes.

3.    Domains and Hosting

• Domain names should be registered in the country being targeted.
• Domain extensions should cover all variations of each language i.e. for France – www.domain.fr
  • If not the primary domain name then a second domain name should be bought and optimised
• The DNS server should be based in the country that is being targeted. It’s normal for the top performing websites for each country to be geographically based in that territory.
• The IP address for the site should be located in the country being targeted

4.    External Text Links

• External text links should come from country specific sites matching the appropriate language and industry relevance.
• The external links are chosen by analyising potential websites to match to Vivid Limes foreign language criteria.
  • Any text links from internal sites should be written in the target language as well.

5.    Local Search

• The site should be listed in all local and language directories
  • Local search listings should be activated in the country itself – using a local address.
  • Adding a local search listing will give the site priority in searches conducted geographically near the company.

6.    Videos and Images

• Any videos or images used on site should be tagged in the target language
• Videos should contain the foreign language in dialogue or if the video is a slide presentation, each slide should be created in the targeted language.

A recent project for a client made me think that an actual design of a Wordpress theme can hold SEO benefits, which a lot of the time are overlooked.

1. Make sure your theme is widget compatible - The free downloadable widgets provide great value to a blog and can help increase links and RSS subscriptions. Of course if you are a coder and want to add this separately the same results can be achieved but this will add time to the final cost.
2. Make sure the blog title is search engine readable – I know again you would think this is standard but I’ve seen many that only offer background or images for the header section.
3. Include RSS feeds in your design – Sounds like common sense but make sure then entries and comments are coded in the theme design, preferably near the top fold of the page. The basic blog feed, not feed burner or other feed websites, the bare basics.
4. Give people space to breathe – Ok, so not directly SEO related but the design should encourage the client or end user of the theme to include a sufficient level of customisation, be this adsense, MyBlogLog or other synthetic extras.
5. Site architecture – When deciding where to put your pages, categories or recent posts consider could enhance your design. Ideally put your pages at the start of the readable code i.e. in the header file, I personally like to see categories next in readable code from a search engine perspective, this will increase the speed of crawling throughout your site, thus keeping everyone happy!

Over the last eighteen months there has been an abundance of SEO (including mine), most provide informative and insightful SEO guides, tips and strategies. I have also come across many that have good intentions but offer very little value to other search marketers and often posts can be misleading to newcomers to the industry.

There are however a select few that continue to provide quality content on a weekly basis that I believe should be on every SEO’s RSS subscription.

1. SEOMOZ

SEOMOZ are an SEO company based in Seattle in the US and have become an anchor in the SEO industry. The leader of the pack so to speak would be Rand Fishkin who has continued to create great post content. The site offers a selection of free SEO tools to assist with analysis and they offer a members area which contains even more. Altogether I cannot find a better SEO blog out there, it’s that simple. I suggest you visit them immediately and start learning or touching up on your SEO skills.

SEOMOZ blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/seomoz

2. Search Engine People

Search Engine People are a Canadian based SEO company that have another fabulous blog that every SEO should be subscribed to. At the forefront of the great insights is Jeff Quipp. It’s strategy in this blog that I find most important, proven methods in dealing with the different scenarios of internet marketing, it’s bloody good dust I tell you.

Search Engine People blog feed: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/feed/

3. Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land is great for a number of reasons but what I like is when technical information or data comes up in posts that it’s always written in a way that is understandable to almost anyone, really great writing styles. The most recognizable character on the team would have to be Danny Sullivan the man who brought us our beloved Sphinn. They always deliver great quality and is a must for every SEO!

Search Engine Land’s blog feed: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/searchengineland

4. Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Journal has a selection of very good blog authors, I tend to get the most value from Ann Smarty, and her posts are so detailed there’s never a short read! They provide insights and links to great tools and content that as an SEO you just can’t ignore.

Search Engine Journals blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SearchEngineJournal

5. Seo Scientist

A lot of other SEO’s would probably argue that there are more deserving SEO blogs to get this number 5 spot. Branko Rihtman is the author of this absolutely fantastic blog. As the name might suggest these blog posts are based around the inner workings of search engine behaviors, with extremely detailed posts and data to back up findings. The frequency of the posts is far less than others but when content is posted you can guarantee you will learn at least 1 new piece of information.

SEA Scientist’s blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoScientist

• Honourable mentions and still recommend signing up to their feeds:

• http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/sew
  http://www.seobook.com/rss.xml
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/SearchEngineRoundtable1
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/searchengineguide
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/Wolf-howl
  http://www.seobythesea.com/?feed=rss2
• And SeoUnique’s = http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoUniqueBlog

Understanding where your client sits in an industry landscape is just as important as the SEO that is implemented. It’s this kind of analysis that shows how achievable it can be for a new websites to achieve success and by what measures. Clients have repeatedly asked me how long will it take to achieve good rankings? Well you could use a selection of research tools to look at the landscape, the search volumes, the competitor activity without looking at competitors individually but looking at this data won’t give you specifics.

Now from the clients brief you should understand what your client does, what products or services they sell and their USP. From this information you should be able to establish your core list of keywords, these keywords are usually the top performing keywords (the hard ones!), use the search engines to benchmark the top 5 competitors in Google, Yahoo and MSN - depending on your client you may need to look at foreign or international search engines to produce an accurate list.

So you will have a list containing he “big guns” as you will. Next you need to find out what your “clever competitors” are doing. Use keyword suggestion tools to find any highly searched keywords that could be used by your client (in website copy) and find the top 5 competitors of those terms.

You will see a lot of correlation in competitors but this is to be expected, now to get a more precise understanding of who’s doing what! I always use the following metrics and suggest you do the same:

1. URL
2. Title Tag
3. Meta Description
4. Meta Keywords
5. Homepage header tags
6. Total backlinks
7. Domain age
8. IP address
9. IP location
10. Registration details
11. Page rank
12. External links from homepage
13. Key backlinks
14. Most used anchor texts in links
15. Page rank distribution
16. Percentage of link types

Using this data from 20 or so competitors will give you a clear understanding as to what works in your clients industry online. You will see how many links and the kind of quality you will need to match, you will find additional keywords that may have slipped the net, plus more competitor insights! When deciding on keywords it much more than simply looking at what is “Googled” a lot and targeting that keyword.

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Google have been clear and expressed their feelings about paid links. We all know we shouldn’t do it, it’s against the webmaster guidelines, you can get penalties and even removals from the index.

I will put my hand up and say I have dabbled in buying links, if you’re talking to an SEO who says they’ve never done it then they may be fibbing (or they have only been doing SEO for a short period of time).

We all know the following:

• Buying links for PR is not allowed
• Selling links to pass PR is not allowed
• Buying links to manipulate the SERPS is not allowed
• Excessive link exchanges are not allowed

There is of course the snitch form report a paid link form by which members of the law abiding public can notify Google if they detect any paid links on a web page. Google can then take their appropriate levels of action towards the websites in question.

Besides from the awesome report a baddie form Google uses variables in their algorithm to detect paid links automatically. Webmasters often leave a trail when adding paid links, be it through code comments, stupid ad placements, link relevancy, backlink increases and trends over time – heck there’s probably a hundred more factors.

Now, to get to my point, in 2005 there were a recorded 60 million blogs worldwide so you can imagine the 2008 figure could be close to 100 million. My preferred method of blogging is Wordpress; it’s simple, easy to setup and pretty damn search engine friendly. So say 40% (my personal estimate) of all blogs worldwide are run using Wordpress, that’s 40 million blogs all with the option to use their “blogroll”.

For you that don’t know what a blogroll is, it is a widget that can be used on blog themes that displays links that you can add through the CMS. Although you can get plugins that change the link relationship to NoFollow, it’s not a popular choice. To be honest why should you change the relationship? If you like websites and think they add value to your website, bloody link to them.

I can’t help but think that there must be hundreds of millions of links all originating from blogrolls alone, a good percentage of these will be paid links, purely because it’s easy to setup and harder for Google to recognise the link, i.e. it won’t have the same characteristics as say a footer link. Unless you are building too many links, using the same kinds of anchor texts, how will Google know your links in the blogroll are genuine or paid? (site relevance must also be a factor).

How Google will react to the continued war on paid links?

My guess is they will discount all blogroll links entirely, either by looking at the website code or making a deal with the blogging software companies and making the default setup NoFollow. I know it sounds rash and perhaps this is the ramblings of a tired man coming to the end of a long hard week? Who knows…