In 2003 I first began speaking on international SEO at conferences and seminars and have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard the question, “Is it better to use local domains or dot coms with a folder or sub-domain for my site?” To me, the answer to this question was obvious even a decade ago but the debate has continued to rage. The next question in popularity is always “…and do I need local hosting?”

I’ll address the hosting issue in a future column. Today we’ll look at the top six reasons why local domains are for winners and dot coms for runners up. I’ll also attempt to put on record why newbies to the promotion of international sites are seduced by the songs of the dot com siren and how to spot those who have been enchanted away on magical waves of sound.

First, I need to give you a little track record to explain my perspective. The very first web site I launched was in 1996 targeting the major western European countries. It used good quality content, local domains and keywords researched by native-speakers (not keywords translated from English). It was this site which led to me discovering SEO but at the time my role was as the straightforward corporate marketing manager who had been given the task of improving the wider European presence of my employer. 13 years later, that site is still the top for its target keywords and has seen competitors, as well as major algorithm updates, come and go without any significant impact.

In the intervening years, my work has involved a great many international and multilingual projects for small, large and very large organizations. In fact, I have not worked actively on any non-international website promotion project since before the millennium and it would be accurate to say that my day is full of “international.” So here are the six reasons why I believe local domains are the clear winners when trying to promote international sites.

1. Clear unequivocal geo-targeted signal

To own a country code domain or ccTLD (in this article called local domains), you actually need to go and buy them and register with a local authority. As such, the local domain has always represented the best controlled and strictest identifier of a specific geography. There are some exceptions of course, but these are mostly to do with certain domains, such as .tv (the tiny island state of Tuvalu) having found that their particular geography had a gold mine domain name it could use to generate revenue.

On several occasions I have been approached by engineers employed by search engine specifically who were working on geo-targeting of their results. In all cases they have given the local domain as the first and best signal they would look for in determining a local result.

We have launched a great many local domain websites that weren’t hosted in the country they were targeted. If they were operating under a local domain, you could virtually guarantee that, within a matter of hours they would show up in the right place in search results. In other words, if the site was a French site, operating under a .fr domain, within hours of a search engine crawl, the site would show up in the area called “Pages de France” or pages from France—even if the site was actually hosted in the US.

2. Good site architecture

The argument is often put forward that it’s far too expensive to switch an existing dot com website with zillions of pages over to its relevant local domains in the various countries its owners wished to target. It can, of course, be expensive to switch the domain used and this needs to be done with great care. However, when corporations calculate the cost of making the change, they tend to give less financial value to the ongoing cost of SEO and of compensating for not having the relevant local domain. This could mean additional local hosting costs or even substantial link building to overcome the inherent disadvantages of the dot com.

By the way, I’m not saying that there aren’t people who simply cannot make the move to local domains or for whom it really is cost-prohibitive—there are indeed some firms for which that is the case. However, even they should have “going local” as an ultimate part of their long term plan. This might be when the site, or parts of the site, are fundamentally re-built, for instance.

Many great SEOs will repeat to you over and over again how important it is to have good site architecture. I’m a firm believer that using local domains for your site is a very good place to start when structuring your site.

3. People generally buy locally

Purist SEOs may not see conversion factors as the most important in recommending which steps a client should take. However, I firmly believe users read URLs in the search engine results and that it has a direct impact on how many of them click on links. Say you’re looking for a “second hand car” and you live in Germany. If you know nothing else about a website, which is most likely to be the most compelling: “secondhandcar.com” or “secondhandcar.de?” To me, it is clearly the latter.

Even beyond the results page, the local domain plays in the mind of the user. “If this is a .de and I live in Munich, then they’re more likely to deliver” is a reasonable conclusion for most folks to draw.

4. Link attractiveness

Having a local domain also helps in your link building programs. Other sites in the same country are much more likely to link to you if you have a local domain. But it’s especially true that they’ll be more interested in receiving links from you if you’re local—after all, they need local links too. Many local directories will only accept local domain names in any case.

5. More powerful internal linking

Links between sites of the same dot com are less valuable, in my view, than links between truly international versions using local domains. So a site which splits its dot com into many countries has an opportunity to reap some benefits from the many different domains it now controls—subject to the normal caveats such as having quality content and offering a good experience to the user.

6. Resistance to the shifting sands of algorithms

I can’t prove this one to you, but after more than a decade of experience I’m convinced that local domain sites tend to be more stable in results than dot coms which move up and down when search engine algorithms change.

Enchantment from the dot com sirens

Why do so many talented SEOs first conclude that dot coms are just as acceptable as local domains when they first start working in the international field? The first issue is that many look at the situation in the UK as a test case for what happens internationally. This is not a good idea as the UK is a very odd example indeed where US sites are often as acceptable to British folks as home-based UK ones. The balance between .co.uk and dot com in the UK is NOT typical of how it works in the wider world.

Second, the structure of a site’s geo-selector—the method by which countries and languages are chosen—plays a key role in sharing link values around the site. Dot coms have an advantage here,but only because using local domains shows up the poor structure of the geo-selector. With improvement, they will easily overtake the dot com.

The third reason is that SEOs just love research and data. So they head into the search engines and check some keywords and then assess how many dot coms or local domains show-up. I have seen this so many times. The problem with this approach is that you would have to check a huge number of keywords to get a sensible result, you’d have to check the correct language keywords and you’d have to work out how competitive the sector is. If it’s relatively uncompetitive—more dot coms will show up. And if you use the wrong keywords… well, that’s a story for another column.

This week in Germany world leaders gathered to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The tearing down of the Wall, a potent symbol of East German oppression since 1961, marked the end of one era and the start of a new one. Strange though it may sound, the tearing down of the Wall in 1989 was a significant influence on how we do search marketing in Europe today.

When doing SEO in Europe, you are bound to run into some issues which that originated in some way from the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this column I’ll try to give you a little historical insight which will help you look at search in Europe through that lens, offering a somewhat different perspective than usual. With this background you’ll benefit when entering the European market by knowing more about the wants and needs of your target audiences, increasing your chances of actually reaching them.

In one day, Europe suddenly became much bigger

One of the obvious consequences of the fall of the Wall is the fact that Europe got bigger. Where before capitalism and therefore business (and search) was focused on Western Europe, the potential market is now more than twice that size. Countries like Poland, Czech and Romania now are big growing markets, especially on the affiliate marketing front.

With the bigger market there is more money flowing around. That is a direct consequence of the tearing down of the Wall. Eastern Germany was almost bankrupt when the Wall went down. Because of Western Europeans coming into Eastern Europe there is a lot more money which went to the East.

The rise of the European Union

In my last column I talked about legal issues in Europe. Many legal issues are caused by the way the European Union works, designed to protect European citizens. In 1989 the European Union was called the European Economic Community (EEC). That was the case until 1993. The EEC wasn’t by far the size of the current European Union. It was only the Western European countries which were members. And they were just working together on some economic issues, not on other regulations.

Eastern European countries weren’t allowed in the Union at first. The German councilor Helmut Kohl fought for their rights and succeeded. After 1993 the European Union saw big growth, and with this growth regulation also started to expand. Many current regulations come from the thought of giving all Europeans the protection and freedom they want and need. Keep in mind one thing: with all the different European countries one institution which regulates may seem to make a lot of regulations. But at least now all the regulations are the same for every country, unlike the fifty different rules marketers might have had to comply with just a few short years ago.

Common coin: The Euro

In 1989 the French Prime Minister Francois Mitterand was at first no fan of the German unification which came shortly after the Wall went down. But he did take the opportunity to get something done he had wanted to do for a while: the introduction of the European coin, what would later be the Euro. He originally wanted this coin just to keep the German Mark, which was very strong, under control. But indirectly he changed the way you do business in Europe. In 1991 was decided to introduce the coin which has been around for a decade now. This decision could never have occurred without the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Politics

The fall of the German Wall had many political consequences, both inside and outside European countries. The best example is Germany itself. After 1989 Helmut Kohl quickly came up with a plan to unify East and West Germany. The German unification still has its influence on the way we work. primarily because now Germany is by far the biggest market in Europe. That wouldn’t have been the case without unification. And Germans need special care. They are very protective of their “own people.” It’s not a coincidence that its the Germans who are attacking Google in different ways. This comes from the German mindset—they have strong protectionistic instincts regarding their country. The fact that German councilor Angela Merkel is herself an original East German citizen might give you a little bit more insight in the way she thinks about big capitalistic companies like Google.

The political climate changed significantly with the fall of the Berlin Wall. And it still works through in the way we do business in Europe. If you optimize for Germany you have to keep in mind the differences between East and West Germans and you have to keep in mind the history to understand why Germans respond (or don’t respond) to what happens on the web.

Google alternatives: Yandex and Seznam

Finally, something directly search-related. Europe is pretty much dominated by Google. In every country Google is the biggest—with two exceptions. In Russia, Yandex is the biggest search engine by market share. In Czech there is Seznam that’s more popular than Google. These search engines have origins in the way things were before 1989. They didn’t exist then, but they were founded with the thoughts and ideas of the people who lived in Eastern Europe before communism fell. That is an entire different mindset than engineers who created US search engines. So if you want to optimize for them you have to think differently.

What if the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen?

What would search in Europe be like if the Berlin Wall hadn’t gone down and communism in Eastern Europe was still flourishing? The “what if” question is always difficult but it could have looked like this in Europe:

• Yandex and Seznam would dominate the entire Eastern European area. Google wouldn’t probably even get a percentage.
• The potential market in which search marketers could work would have been just half of what it is today.
• Eastern Europe would probably be broke, so you wouldn’t be able to get much profit there.
• There would be more different regulations to work with. Every country would think of their own.
• Instead of a single, unified currency, you would have to work with more than 50 different currencies.
• In all it would have been a lot less interesting market to work in.

So why this lesson in European history then? What is that worth for working in search in Europe? Well, a lot. Let me give you some takeaways:

• If you look at Europe don’t just look at France, Britain and Spain. Also consider Poland, Romania, Russia and other Eastern European states too. These are big markets with lots of opportunities.
• As in the US, politics plays a big role in Europe. Be aware of the political situation and it can work in your benefit.
• Chances are that in Europe if you want to do business you’ll run into European rules. Keep that in mind and keep in mind where Europeans come from: a divided continent, trying to work together. It could have been a lot worse with lots of different regulations everywhere. Now, be sure to look at the European Union first.
• Though Google is the biggest, there are other interesting search engines that offer opportunities for smart marketers. Try looking at Yandex and Seznam if you target Eastern Europeans. You might be surprised about the ROI you can gain from a well executed search marketing campaign.

Following on from my last column when I gave guidance on how to prepare your site for successful international link building, it’s now time to look at the rules of international link building itself—at least the new rules that differ from a typical single country project. Fundamentally, link building is the same everywhere—which means it’s important to consider the quality of the links, check they’re not no-followed and take a view of the quality of the site from which they come. But there are some new factors to be considered—which I’m calling the “new rules of international link building.”

Rule 1: Location, location, location is everything

The most obvious new parameter to consider is location of the site on which a link originates—or perhaps more appropriately, where the search engines believe the link originates. To succeed in a specific geographic region, you are going to need not only good content targeted at that region and in the correct language, but also links to your site from within that region. So, if your target is to sell tire fitting to Austrians, you need a site in German and you need to acquire links from within Austria.

What does that expression “within Austria” actually mean? When you start to consider this question closely, you begin to realize just why local domains really are so crucial outside of the US. There are really only two factors which make any sense—an IP address from an Austrian server or a ‘.at’ domain for Austria.

If you’re running a hosting company serving a particular market—such as Austria—you’re going to want to be competitive and you’re going to want a good connection to the backbone of the internet. This makes it attractive for smaller hosting companies based in many smaller markets to sell—or rather to re-sell—hosting space which sits on servers which may not be located directly in Austria but might actually be in the US, UK or other country where servers resources are easier and more cost-effective to come by. In other words, not physically hosted in Austria.

What this means is that, when choosing a local link partner, the easiest way to be sure that a link from an Austrian organization is treated by search engines as a fully-fledged genuine 100% Austrian link is for it to be coming from a site with a ‘.at’ domain.

Rule 2: Correct geo-targeting helps

Meanwhile, Google allows you to specify within Webmaster Central which geographic region you would like your “.com” to be targeted at. This is a useful workaround for organizations who have a site hosted in the US and on a “.com.” But it is a workaround and there are certain deficiencies with relying on this technique. One relates to selecting link partners. If your “.com” site is targeted at Turkey, for instance, but it’s not using a “.tr” domain then you may find local Turkish link partners don’t identify with your site or wish to exchange links with you because the link will still appear to be US hosted on a “.com.”

A quick straw poll demonstrated that few people really know how Google will treat the location of the link on a geo-targeted page—but most believe that it will be given the location of the hosting if the domain is a “.com.” In a way, it doesn’t matter what the truth is, as this is a case of “perception is reality.” The solution is to correctly geo-target your site which means either hosting it locally to the market you’re targeting (and check that the hosting really is local!) or better still to run your site on the appropriate local domain.

Rule 3: Not all links are created equal

I hope to be digging into this fascinating topic more in the future with the help of the team at Majestic SEO who provided the sample data to illustrate my point. Many link builders consider the quality of links by looking at factors such as PageRank. They will also have an idea of what makes a good PageRank based on previous experience. With the new international rules of link building, it’s time to forget PageRank. Or at least don’t try and compare PageRank scores between markets because the pool of links sited within a particular country or domain will vary significantly.

The data in the chart below looks at a small sample of Majestic global link data looking at the average number of backlinks per unique domain in the top 75 countries on the database. It produces some interesting findings.

The number of backlinks per unique domain for a sample of data in the database.

The chart illustrates and hopefully proves my point that the value of links in particular countries or regions varies subject to how much link “competition” there is in that country—and the quality of the competing sites. It doesn’t even matter if you agree or disagree with the findings in the chart as it will vary by sector—the key point is, “It’s different!”

Top of the list is the European Union, which is a good example. For the purposes of this dataset, the European Union is sites which carry the ‘.eu’ domain. There are relatively few of these—but the typical quality of sites within that group is good. What this means is that, at least in theory, obtaining links from sites classified as within the European Union will be good for the whole network of sites, but the quality of links within that region will need to be of a particularly good quality to compete. Equally, a Saudi Arabian link will be good for the whole network—but expect standards to be high within that country.

At the bottom of the scale, countries such as the Philippines or Uzbekistan will require fewer higher PageRank sites to be competitive within those countries and will offer less value for the whole network globally. The bottom line is—links within some countries can help the whole site perform better globally whereas other countries may be easier to target locally—but will add less to the global link juice. Might be time to re-think your international link building strategy!

There’s a significant opportunity for marketers who take time to understand markets beyond their home territory and deploy search programs that allow them to connect directly with consumers in their native language. “In their native language” is the make or break part of succeeding in a new market, yet too many companies fail to even consider many optimization fundamentals when they are localizing their sites for specific markets.

A global market research report from Common Sense Advisory & Lionbridge reported that 72.4% of consumers say they would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language. Fully 72.1% said they spend most or all of their time on sites in their own language. Another study by the Localization Industry Standards Association found that companies can expect to recover $25 of value for every $1 they spend on localizing content.

Companies are using this type of research to justify their localization expenditures. It fascinates me that companies can see the value in localizing their site content, but then don’t allocate any money for optimizing that content so it can be found and rank well in search engines. Make no mistake: this is not request for a global SEO pity party, but more of a call to action for companies to integrate search optimization into their localization workflow.

The image below is a slide from that presentation I gave over ten years ago in a dozen countries at Internet World conferences showing how SEO fits perfectly into localization process. Sadly, no one listened then and only a few listen today. The point is as strong today as it was then: integrate or fail.

The first—and most obvious intersection—is integrating your keyword research into the glossary development phase of the project. Developing the glossary of your “key product terms” is one of the first things your localization firm will develop for you especially if they use translation management tools. Rather than looking at them blankly when they ask you for it, you can start with the list of keywords from your local market. So unless you consulted a crystal ball to decide to enter a market you should have at least a rough list of critical terms in the local language and understand their relative importance via keyword demand.

I strongly suggest you bounce your list of words and search volume against the glossary developed by the localizers to make sure both lists are complete and contain not only linguistically correct words but the most popular keywords used by local searchers.

During the content translation phase things can get a bit tricky. As noted above, translators will use the most appropriate word for that language when they work on the content, pulling from the glossary and their knowledge of the local language. It is important to ensure your localization firm understands the optimal places for local language keywords such as titles, headlines and developing a compelling and action-oriented meta description and first paragraph. While the translator will develop a well-written and linguistically correct piece of copy, they may do so at the expense of keyword inclusion. Remember, they are experts in localization and are unlikely to have much search knowledge.

The last phase is the page and site quality control phase where, if performed correctly, can almost guarantee success in your local SEO project. During step this step language tags are checked as well as ensuring the meta description, anchor text and alt tags were translated. In an optimized quality control process, editors check for keyword prominence and the overall content relevance of the page. However, if unaware of the optimization best practices, editors can unravel optimization integrated in the previous step by removing duplicate uses of keywords or replacing more frequently searched terms with a variant of the word they think is more suitable.

While integration cannot guarantee high rankings or financial success in a local market, integration can significantly reduce post launch optimization and content update costs for site owners. The increased traffic and savings from the economies of scale further solidifies the value of the search team to the organization. With the exponential growth of search usage around the world, companies who can develop compelling, relevant local market content and get it in front of the right audiences can reap true riches from the goldmine of the “interweb.”

The majority of international link building projects or RFPs I see are based on existing successful projects—so why do so many fail when they expand internationally? The simple answer is that international link building requires a different type of preparation than national link building. Why? For most people, starting a link building campaign is relatively straightforward—you simply go out and get the links to point to the site. Internationally, it’s more complicated. Yes, you need links, but you need to have them pointing to the right corners of the site—in the right language—and connecting back to the core, somehow.

For instance, you’ll most probably be working on a project involving at least two languages—probably English and then one from FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish) or the Asian Trinity (Mandarin, Japanese or Korean) or Russian. In many of these cases, the language is a “world language” such as French or Spanish, spoken by many people in different nations. That presents a wider range of link building opportunities than those in just one country where a single language is spoken, but means you have to take a wide angle view.

Planning geo-targeting is the first step

Before you start, it’s important to do a little planning. Having a clear geo-targeting strategy is the very first decision you need to make. The target website’s geo-selection architecture is also critical. Don’t get confused by these two geo-things: they are different from one another, and require different planning. Here’s why.

Geo-targeting means deciding not only which markets you plan to target but also which search engine radio selector buttons you wish to appear in, to put it simply. Let’s say you wish to target the French in France and French-speakers in Morocco or other French-speaking countries but you only have one French-language website. What most search marketers would do is to sacrifice appearing in results from the “Pages: France” (pages located on servers in France) in favor of focusing on “Pages Francophone” results (any French language pages) This allows you to concentrate on promoting via the language rather than any specific countries. However, in most cases, this would be a mistake.

The right strategy—even if you’re focusing on French-speakers rather than pages from France would still be to target positioning your site in France. You’ll gain more potential traffic, as well as a cultural advantage. From a traffic point of view, the greatest concentration of French-speakers is based in France, the language’s motherland, and a percentage of them will choose to set their search on “Pages: France.” You may as well capture those extra visits. Additionally, the cultural angle is that some French-speakers outside France will choose to search ‘in France’ because they expect a solution to be available there even when it isn’t in their home country. An example of this would be Algerians who have a native Google.dz search still often choose to go to Google.fr!

A lot of confusion often exists in people’s minds between language, country and region. Some may want to be able to choose the language and country or region separately, but this is not the case for most searchers and isn’t especially easy to manage from an SEO perspective. For most it will be better to define regions and link them to a language. This is what I referred to as geo-selection (or informally geos) above. So, Belgique would represent the French-speaking area of Belgium and België the Dutch or Flemish area, and each would have its own separate web site. Except in a small number of cases, languages are usually linked to a particular geographic region, which makes approach easier than it may seem at first look.

Geo-selection means sharing links

There is little point in embarking on an international link building program unless the method by which your different country sites interlink has been properly set-up. So here are some rules, my rules, for how geo-selection should work:

• The geo-selector itself should have its own URL. This could be a dot com site or some other domain such as dot net (preferred) or it might be an internal URL
• Each page should link back to the country selector URL. This enables you to pass link equity around the site and will strengthen the results you obtain from your efforts
• A user should be able to choose their own country and therefore language
• Important content should link across to the same content in other major languages—good place to do this is in a sitewide footer

You’ll note that what that means is that the same page can link in two different ways at once in an “international” sense; to the international selector and to similar content in other languages. I highly recommend this approach.

Over recent years, a debate has raged over whether local domains or dot coms are better for international web sites. I have made it something of a personal mission to argue the case for local domains at SMX conferences around the globe. I believe the reason so many came to the conclusion that dot com sites were “better at passing PageRank” is because very few sites have actually set up their geo-selector approach correctly because, quite simply, that’s very difficult to do on sites which already exist.

Consider reputation and regulation

Having fixed both geo-targeting and geo-selection, you’re almost ready to head on and kick off your international link building. The next thing you need to do (and it would be best if you created a first draft for consideration by your international agency) is to look at your international reputation. If you have a strong reputation in the US, but are unknown elsewhere, then link building is going to be tough and you need to adapt your strategies to suit. For instance, if you have a low brand awareness then it would be best to combine directory submissions with online PR to get things moving.

Beware also of regulatory blind spots. If your business is legal in the US—but not in the countries you’re targeting—then you’re also going to find link building tough to say the least. And as Bas van den Beld wrote last week in this column—there are some significant variations even between European Union countries.

Don’t forget the keyword research

You’ll find enough in this column on making sure you do keyword research the right way – which means that it is carried out by a search marketing-trained native speaker of your target language. Obviously this, and the general quality of your content, will have a significant impact on the success of your campaign as well.

Now we’ve got some of the preparation out of the way you can get cracking with deciding on your international link building strategy. More in a future column.

In my last column I addressed cultural differences within European countries. The main point was that Europe may be one continent, but you cannot treat every European the same way—there are many cultural differences among people in different countries, and in some cases, even within a single country. This is even more true from a legal standpoint. Each country in Europe has different laws and regulations that internet marketers must abide by. And Europe also has the European Commission, which writes out laws of its own.

In this article I’ll take a look at three examples of different rules, regulations and laws in Europe. All of them illustrate the differences between the U.S. and European laws, but also highlight the differences between European countries.

Gambling laws

Gambling laws differ in different European countries. Where the UK is one of the major countries when it comes to number of online gambling sites and players, other countries stay behind. This is because every European country decides for itself how to handle gambling regulations.

In the Netherlands, for example, you are not allowed to run a gambling website. The law says the government can only hand out one license. That goes to “Holland Casino,” a casino run by the government. The gambling law even goes further. You are not allowed to play a gambling game, either online or offline, if you know that there is no license for that game. You can however play when no money is exchanged between parties.

Some changes to the law are being made right now. Very probably the law will be changed slightly so that poker will be allowed.

Despite the laws, this doesn’t mean that the Dutch are not playing gambling games online. They are, on many websites. So as a marketer of a gambling site you can target the Dutch, you just cannot do so on a Dutch server with a Dutch website. Host your site in the UK and you will probably still get to those Dutch. Beware though: if you want to advertise for these kind of websites you are also not allowed to place a banner for a gambling site on a Dutch website. Webmasters in Holland aren’t allowed to accept these banners. You have to find other ways to get the Dutch to find your site.

Copyright laws

The Dutch copyright association, Buma/Stemra, decided to fight for the rights of the songwriters, and announced a measure which would affect many. The association said they were intending to charge a fee for YouTube videos containing music, meaning they would be charging bloggers. Embedding music in videos would cost 130 Euros ($191 dollars) for six videos. As you can imagine, the Dutch blogging community was far from amused. They decided to fight the association over this policy, and were successful. Last Friday the copyright association decided not to charge for embedding music in videos after all.

Though the embedding of videos is thus still “legal” in the Netherlands, the Dutch Copyright Association is sure to be looking into other ways of “protecting” songwriters and will undoubtedly introduce new measures. And that means everybody has to be careful, not just the Dutch. Buma/Stemra after all also intended to charge all bloggers, Dutch or not, for embedding music in videos.

The Dutch aren’t alone in this. Back in 2007 YouTube launched different versions of its site for different countries outside the US. Google however forgot to agree with the copyright organization GEMA on the fees concerning the copyright-protected clips that are uploaded on YouTube. That meant that in Germany YouTube ran into a lot of legal problems. These resulted in a measure that some videos on YouTube, which have specific content which contains music, are blocked and cannot be viewed from within Germany.

Google ran into more copyright issues in Europe. In Poland for example they can’t use the name Gmail because they didn’t own the domain. And recently Google got into trouble in several countries over its book-scanning initiative—Germany, in fact, sued Google over copyright issues.

Google’s problems could also be yours. If videos are blocked in Germany or any other country you should be aware of this when setting up a campaign. It would be a shame if that one video you worked so hard on was blocked after all. And if Google is not showing content which could help your campaign, you should at least be aware of that.

Keyword bidding on trademarks

The third subject I want to address is related to PPC: advertising on competitors brands. Virginia Nussey wrote an interesting post on this issue several weeks ago. She showed how in the US its legal to bid on any keyword, trademarked or not. In Europe the law is different. Google announced in June that it would no longer investigate trademark infringement claims based on AdWords trademark bidding in 200 countries across the world. That included a lot of European countries, but not all. Some of the biggest countries were not included in the policy change.

For example, the Netherlands (yes, those Dutch again), Belgium, France, Spain and Germany still do not allow advertisers to bid on trademarks they do not own. That means that in those countries you have to change your AdWords strategy if they are based on advertising on trademarked keywords. It’s therefore very useful to look at a country and its rules before you start a campaign.

How to handle the rules and regulations

These three examples illustrate just a fraction of all the different rules and laws in Europe. These laws definitely affect large companies like Google—but what do they mean for an SEO or site owner? Very much.

Advertising on trademarks is the most obvious one: if you’re not allowed to bid on trademarked terms this may affect your campaign. The same goes for gambling laws. Copyright issues are more difficult, since there are many different rules on that. But you don’t have to be a lawyer to get things done legally.

A couple of takeaways when you plan on campaigning in Europe regarding the rules and laws:

• Make a plan for which countries you do and don’t want to target
• Do your research for each specific country, not for Europe as a whole
• Know work-arounds like hosting a site in a different country than the one you’re targeting where what you’re doing isn’t allowed
• Use Europeans to find out which rules and laws you will run into

Above all, don’t get scared off by all the rules—it’s less difficult to do search marketing in Europe than it may seem.

Today I’m speaking at SMX East on international paid search, and I’ll be putting forward a strategy for multinational search advertising which could lead to a cache of buried treasure. It starts with everyone’s quest for best practice and excellence, which ironically sometimes causes us to overlook the significance of the mundane. Consider the humble keyboard. This device, especially when it comes to multinational search, is guilty of grossly inflating costs for paid search marketers on millions of searches. Why?

The online versus offline debate generally ignores the fact that all searches start in the physical world with a human brain directing fingers to depress relevant keys on a keyboard. Other forms of character input have been invented, including voice and various types of joystick devices, but keyboards are the primary way searchers express their needs regardless of whether the language is Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Arabic or Farsi.

But keyboards can be problematic, especially when a searcher is typing queries in languages that rely on accents to inflect meaning. The reason this issue is rarely discussed is because keyboards have a more limited impact in English. For marketers whose mother tongue is English, discussing the impact a keyboard can have on an effective search marketing campaign is not going to make the agenda of any “serious” meeting.

I’m currently in France, spending time researching and exploring French search behaviors and comparing notes with French colleagues. One objective is to clarify the French accented character question: are they used or aren’t they?

The role of accents in paid search

It turns out the keyboard has a major impact in French because most accents are a good long finger stretch to the periphery of the keyboard and there are quite a few accents too. It is easier to type characters without accents than those with. It has long been generally assumed that the French frequently drop accents when they search. But do they really? If so, to what extent?

And does this really matter anyway? Surely Google “normalizes” all accents giving them the equivalent results whether the accent is present or not. Google is certainly very astute when it comes to accents, dealing with them in several different ways. But its approach changes from time to time, and you need to keep a vigilant watch to spot the shifts—especially when it comes to international SEO. But accents play a significant role in paid search as well.

Consider just one accent—the French acute or “aigu.” It raises some interesting questions for search marketers. But note that the behavior of this accent is different to others in French and not necessarily the same as those in other languages. Each must be considered on its individual merits.

An “acute” impact on searcher behavior

Currently, the French acute is normalized in Google’s organic search results. In other words, you are presented with the same set of results whether you type the accent on your keyboard or not—with some slight variations if your query triggers universal search results. Intriguingly this is not true for paid search results, where the acute accent is treated as a separate character. This is partly because the French acute accent does sometimes distinguish between similarly spelt words which have different meanings. As a result, French searchers’ use or non-use of the acute—and Google’s treatment of it within the AdWords system—is costing less vigilant search marketers real cash.

To what extent are French searchers using accents in their queries? The AdWords keyword tool offers some good insights.

We took six single keywords—each requiring an acute accent—and compared the search volumes for the first 150 keywords containing the single keyword. This way we were looking at single and double keywords and expanding our sample sizes.

Vive la différence

Our chart below compares monthly French search volumes, showing that the use of accents varied significantly between different keywords. Our first keywords “équipements” (equipement / supplies) and “météo” (weather) had the highest accent loss whereas “téléphones” (telephones) and “photo appareils numérique” (digital cameras) had the highest use of accents. Why the differences?

In the case of économique and équipements one possible explanation for the non-use of accents is that the accent features on the first letter of the word. It is accepted practice in French not to use accents on characters if they are capitalized. My colleagues agreed they would often use initial capitals in searching which is not shown in the AdWords system—but this would significantly increase the number of searches showing as “accentless” and featuring for accentless inventory regardless of the fact that the original spelling was fully correct with implied accents.

The long tail includes accents—at least for now

If you use long tail techniques in your paid search, deploying exact matches in place of broad matches, you should test acute-accented words with the same word, accentless. You should pay particular attention to any words where the very first character should be accented. You should see differing clickthrough rates and lower cost on one or other version. The net benefit is that you’ll often be featured on search results with less competition or broad matched competition giving you a potentially significant financial advantage.

Google, of course is expanding its potential inventory through this treatment of the “aigu.” And if you happened to be in the telecoms market, based on our research, using this strategy could improve your performance on a very conservative 22 million French searches per month—where even a very small improvement will go along way! And noting that 75% of searches in our study did not feature accents, for some this tactic will be the veritable “poule aux oeufs d’or” (the hen that lays the golden eggs)!

ComScore’s announcement in early July that Baidu had become the second largest global search engine caused a fair bit of chatter in the industry as well as getting the attention of global marketers. ComScore further reported that Baidu had more than 8 billion searches and 145 million unique visitors in June meaning Baidu’s market share in China is nearly 76% to Google China’s 19.8 percent.

After this announcement, and the recent changes announced by Baidu, those of us with connections in China received a flood of calls and emails from agencies and companies asking how they can get in on this massive opportunity to connect with China’s 338 million online users.

This escalated interest in reaching China, as well as the recent improvements to Baudi’s platform prompted me to take a new look at Baidu and to answer the most frequent burning questions being asked by curious advertisers.

Everything is in Chinese so how do I advertise?

Advertising in Baidu now is a lot easier than it has been in the past. Obviously, if you, your team or agency have the ability to read and input Chinese you can set up an account by going to Baidu’s Advertiser web site. If you can’t interact with the Chinese interface, Baidu has set up an International Support site with English language email and phone support from account managers who can help you get started and answer questions.

However, for most companies who don’t have the Chinese language capability your best option will be to use one of the growing number of agencies that are offering full service solutions for Baidu. For many companies these specialist agencies are the better option since they can handle coordination, ad development, optimization as well as the keyword research and cultural nuances necessary to be successful online in China.

Is it true the only way into Baidu is via paid ads?

Six months ago, search marketers would have told you the only way to get exposure in Baidu was to buy your way in. For many popular consumer phrases, as many as the first ten to twenty pages of results were all paid ads, which is why many SEO firms in China charged businesses by the click to get them onto the first page of rankings.

Paid ad dominance is no longer the norm under Baidu’s new platform code named “Phoenix Nest” (a.k.a. “Professional Edition”) which was officially deployed in April. Essentially, Phoenix Nest moved paid search listings from the left side to the right side and the top three listings making SERPs look and feel more like western search engines.

In early September Baidu migrated over 800,000 keywords from their old system into the Phoenix Nest platform. This migration has resulted in a significant decrease in the number of paid results on the left side. Those sites lucky enough to backfill the now open SERPS benefit from significantly increased organic traffic.

In a future article I will dig deeper into the characteristics of Baidu’s paid search platform, but for now I can tell you the new platform is very similar to Google’s with many of the same optimization techniques working equally well on Baidu. Just like Google, Baidu has deployed a quality score mechanism called “Comprehensive Rank Index” focused on improving the overall quality of ads for searchers and advertisers.

How can I improve my organic rankings on Baidu?

The good news is most of the normal on page optimization factors you implement to rank well in Google will also improve your rankings in Baidu. The algorithm is not as sophisticated as Google’s nor does it currently put much weight on inbound links which makes life a lot easier for marketers to make quick changes to their site and start reaping the benefits. Some items that are unique to ranking well in Baidu are:

The site must be in Chinese. The obvious first step to ranking well in organic results is to have content in Chinese. Simplified Chinese is the primary language of Mainland China so it is important to make sure you have used the correct language tags on the site.

The site should be hosted in China. While Baidu has many non-China hosted sites in its database and it is not a requirement to have a .cn domain or be hosted in China, it is a strong recommendation. The main reason for Baidu’s preference for local hosting is due to government firewalls and poor connectivity issues that are common in China. Local hosted sites stand a greater chance of being found and reindexed when they are in China.

Put the most important content at the top of the page. Due to poor connectivity, Baidu’s crawlers want to get as much content as they can and will often simply crawl only the first 100 to 120k of content on a page (remember AltaVista, circa 1998?).

All-Flash sites are a problem. Since marketers could buy their way into Baidu results in the past, many sites did not need to consider the negative implications of Flash only content on their organic search performance. This has been one of the primary reasons many large company sites are having a hard time gaining traction in Baidu’s organic results.

If you are China-ready, look at Baidu’s options to increase market share

The recent changes in Baidu offer a number of opportunities for marketers to maximize their search presence in both paid and organic search. While I am not advocating you jump into the market unprepared, I do strongly suggest you look at the new opportunities with Baidu as a way to expand your market share and sales before your competition does.

To succeed in China it is critical to understand your Chinese consumer, how they use the Internet and how they would engage your products in their local markets. While the opportunities in China are significant, there are still many challenges for Western companies to overcome to be successful. Those ready to embrace these challenges and leverage the new opportunities of Baidu should be on their way to reaping the benefits China has to offer.

If you want to learn best practices for expanding your search marketing campaign to the international stage, the best person to ask is someone who’s been there, done it and got the t-shirt. In the case of multinational search marketing, Barry Lloyd of Microchannel Technologies (aka MakeMeTop) has an entire closet full of t-shirts. For just about any place you can name, he’s been there, has a client in the country and can point you to must-see sights—and bars.

A British born son of a brilliant chemical engineer, Barry’s company today runs bid management tools and tracking for agencies in roughly 130 countries. He’s been in search marketing since before Google was created and started out as one of the original search engine optimization firms, and his reputation for SEO still lives on today. But his history as a programmer goes back way beyond the web, the internet and search. Internationally, he has lived in the US, Africa, the Far East, the UK and Canada. He now lives in Ireland “because it reminds me of England when I was a child.” He has worked everywhere from Iran to India to Russia to Taiwan.

I saw down recently with Barry in Belfast to gain insights which might guide search marketers to global success. What follows are excerpts from our video interview—if you’d prefer to watch the entire thing just scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the “play” button.

We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto

Quoting from the Wizard of Oz, Barry stressed the fact that life and culture is different from market to market. “This ain’t Kansas, Dorothy” crops up numerous times in our interview. But his first key tip is really about not leaving Kansas in the first place but taking a step back before entering new markets. “Make sure you have the infrastructure in place to service properly the services and products in the market you’re going to be targeting. It’s only then that you can go onto the second stage which is thinking of having web pages in the correct language and idiom of the market to which you’re selling.”

Have respect for the market

“The commonest error is people not thinking it through properly. They’ll use a translator like Babelfish to go and translate their English page into what they think is an approximation of the language that they’re targeting. They go and do the same thing with their creatives and ads and not surprisingly aren’t overwhelmed with sales and conversions.”

For many years, Barry has had a close relationship with the far east, spending considerable time there. He works closely with leading Chinese search engine Baidu, including some joint development plans that he was keeping very close to his chest. You get the impression that the influence of the East shapes Barry’s advice fundamentally, “It can really be boiled down to one essential thing and that is people having respect for the market they’re entering.” Barry also cites IBM as an example of an organization which researches markets cleverly even changing product names when necessary to suit local marketing requirements.

He suggests you put yourself in your customer’s shoes, “Imagine you’re viewing web pages from a non-English speaking environment containing amusing double entendres. Would you buy anything from them?”

Make sure your tools work in different regions

Don’t forget to check the toolkit, “Tried and tested tools may not work in the country you’re entering, “ he adds. “This is simply because structures have been made for one particular environment and it may not work in other areas.” It was apparently spotting this technology gap within the big analytics and bid management providers which encouraged Barry and team to go and launch their own system, building in the capability to handle both multiple currencies and double-byte characters from the outset. Roughly put for each English character—one character equals one byte—Chinese needs at least two bytes or two English characters per Chinese character to function. The consequences? “The moment you start moving to other types of characters such as Chinese or Japanese, it is very difficult to incorporate the two structures together in your database and have it function. We built our software on day one to have the ability to work anywhere with any character set.”

Money and emerging markets

Barry believes the most frustrating and challenging aspect of dealing with the emerging markets is money. “We have a subsidiary in Russia and you’d think it would be a simple matter to send Euros or Dollars to Russia to pay the wages. It can’t be done. A contract has to be entered into, an agreement made with the Department of the Interior, sums of a certain amount are contracted to, the Department of the Interior gives permission to the bank to receive those sums—and then you can pay less but you can’t pay more. In China, you have the opposite problem. It is almost impossible to get money out of China. But getting money into China is no problem whatsoever.”

Don’t think it’s as easy as 1,2,3, Google

You may also have to rely on search engines other than Google. Markets such as China and Russia have local engines&mdashBaidu and Yandex respectively—which are strongly entrenched locally and that brings it’s own complications he says. I asked him which is the most difficult search engine to work with? “Paradoxically, it’s Google,” says Barry. “Every other engine from Yahoo and Microsoft and Yandex to Baidu provides us with a senior level engineer to work with and gives us between six to nine months notice of significant changes. With Google we get almost no warning at all.” I press him on the reasons for this, “I don’t think Google likes organizations like us,” he says, “Because they’re trying to stay a step ahead and we’re bringing similar technology to users of other engines.”

The next leap forward in search marketing

Aside from developments in the mobile market, where Asia is years ahead of the west in actually making use of mobile technologies, Barry believes the next big leap forward in search marketing will come from linking offline transactions to online using new technologies which are only just being developed. “My personal interest is in dealing with what is going to happen in attributing sales which resulted offline, to online activity. That is going to be the next leap forward in search marketing.”

Bing and Baidu

Barry made some particularly interesting observations about the relationship between Bing and Baidu. Barry explains, “Bing was, after all, predominantly built in China using engineers, many of whom previously worked for Baidu. If I was Microsoft, rather than striking up a partnership with Baidu, I might even take a punt at an acquisition. Stranger things have happened.”

Final thoughts? “Don’t take anything for granted. After all, this ain’t Kansas, Dorothy.”

If you ask any search marketer what the main issue is when trying to optimize your website(s) for Europe he will tell you: language. But there is more to keep in mind when trying to win over Europeans.

Europe consists of fifty countries. If you think that means you will have to optimize for fifty languages, you’re wrong. The European countries which are part of the European Union together already have 23 official languages. But that’s just the European Union. Count in the rest of Europe and you can add many more.

The “problem” of focusing exclusively on languages in Europe is that its not one country, one language. It’s one country, many languages. Take the Netherlands for example. With only 17 million people living on a little piece of ground which (41 thousand square kilometers, which is about 16 thousand square miles) the official language is Dutch, but Frisian is also accepted as a official language. Next to that there are about 8 or 9 dialects, but when optimizing for websites you don’t have to take those in account.

When traveling south from the Netherlands it gets more complicated. In Belgium there are three official languages: Dutch, French and German. For the Belgians its therefore is very tempting to copy and paste the Dutch, French and German content and think you’re done. Think again. Dutch spoken in Belgium is a different kind of Dutch than that spoken in the Netherlands. And the same goes for the French compared to what they are speaking in France.

Getting the picture? You can probably guess what I will be saying about the countries when traveling to the south even more. How many official languages do you need to handle in France? Surprise! Only one. The French are considered to be very stubborn and very proud of their country. That translates into the language where, though about ten times the size of the Netherlands and with five times more people living there, they only speak one language. A complete different situations than with their neighbors further south. In Spain Castillian Spanish is the official language, spoken by 74% of the population but the Spanish also speak Catalan, Galician and Basque.

So now you get the picture: Europe has many countries and many languages. Some say there are over 200 official languages to take in account. Others also look at the dialects and then count over a 1000. So language really is a big issue when optimizing sites for Europeans.

“Ok,” I can hear you saying. “Thanks! Now I know there are many languages, so let’s get to work and translate and optimize our sites.” Stop, wait right there. There’s more…

Language is one thing, but Europe is a strange continent in which you have other things to take in account when optimizing. For one thing, there is the cultural aspect. I’m talking about the differences in culture in the way people live and think.

Last year TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was part of a panel discussing the differences between Europe and the US at the internet marketing event LeWeb in Paris. He decided to be his usual self and became somewhat “rude” when accusing the Europeans of being lazy. Wherever did he get that idea? Here’s how: the days before he was invited by the organizer of the event to join in on a “typical” French lunch. And that means it will take a couple of hours in which you wine and dine. Arrington believed that the French therefore were lazy, because they prefer long lunches to working hard.

He could not have been more wrong. Yes, the French do like to take long lunches, but they also work later towards dinner-time. In fact, dinner time in France is typically not before 8PM. But there was an even bigger mistake Arrington made: with his statement he showed he had no idea of what the differences in European cultures are. Taking a step back northbound for example, to the Netherlands, lunch time is very different than in France. There lunch most of the time consists of a sandwich which is eaten within half an hour. Then again, when its 6PM most Dutch will be out of the office, heading home to have dinner early.

“So,” you say, “You guys eat at different times, what does that have to do with optimizing my webpages?” . Well, everything. The Europeans have different lifestyles, which means they also have different online behavior. They are online at different hours and most probably also looking for different kind of topics, thus searching differently.

Europe is a complicated continent. I could go on for hours. I will get back on different kind of issues in future columns, but there is one more I’d like to highlight here.

Let’s combine the two issues discussed above: language and culture. Do not, I repeat, do not, look at a list of languages from different countries, find the overlapping languages and target them with one site. You will be in big trouble. I already mentioned the difference between Netherlands Dutch and Belgian Dutch when it comes to language. There are more countries in Europe with that issue: in both Germany and Austria for example they speak German. But the language barrier is bigger than just the differences within the language.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that every country in Europe has its own culture. Hey, we fought many wars (and still do) because people felt they didn’t “belong” in one country but should have their own. And though they might speak the same language, they feel they are completely different. And that causes the final issue I’m discussing here: targeting.

For example, when targeting Austria, which is located just below Germany, it’s tempting to set up a German site and use it to target the Austrians also. After all, the language is quite similar. However, chances are you will not get much traffic from Austrians. Why? Simply because the Austrians do not trust the German websites. If they see the shop is on a German .de domain they will be more reluctant to buy a product than when it’s on an Austrian domain. Just because they have a different culture. The same might go for trying to sell products to a Dutchman and targeting him with a Belgian site.

In some countries there are even differences within the country. Take for example Spain, where Basques and Catalan really are living their own lives and where most feel not connected, even hostile in some cases, towards the country itself. A quick example to show how much: last year the Spanish national soccer team won the European Championships. Where in Madrid people were celebrating on the streets, in Barcelona it was relatively quiet. It was after all the Spanish team which had won, not the Catalan team.

So, lots of things to take in account when optimizing for Europe. How to handle all of these language and cultural differences? A couple of tips to close off with:

• Research the differences in languages.
• Hire a native speaker to write content.
• Know the history of the areas you are targeting.
• Get domains and write sites for every specific country
• The best way to get a feeling of the differences: travel. Visit some of the countries you are targeting and see how people live. It will help you make your site better.
• Talk to Europeans: If you don’t have the resources for traveling to Europe be sure to talk to Europeans and get an idea of how they live. Remember: Europeans are everywhere: at events, living all over the world or online.
• Too much work? Too complicated? Hire or work with a European firm. They can help you get the differences sorted out and translate and optimize your sites properly.

Finally, if this all seems like too much fuss to go through and you don’t feel like optimizing for Europe, think again. It’s a huge market. Europeans search more than any other continent, are more active on the web than any other part of the world and there are 731 million possible clients out there. So it might take a little bit of work, it could well be worth it.