International SEO - Adwords Tutorial

- [David] It's no overstatement to say that the internet has revolutionized our world, and it's shrunk it considerably. For many of us that remember having our international pen pals in countries far away, not that many years ago, it's hard to believe that we're now just a video call away from anyone in just about any corner of the globe. And as the internet has evolved, companies the world over have found themselves able to find and interact with global audiences like never before. Websites are able to serve content, share data, and even make eCommerce transactions across borders and time zones. And no matter where someone is, as long as they're connected, there's the possibility to discover and conduct business on the opposite side of the world. But as our global market reach grows, so does the competition, and as this continues to accelerate, it's becoming increasingly difficult to get noticed. If you have one or more web properties that target international or country specific audiences, then you'll need to do everything you can to make sure you're being found across a worldwide marketplace. And that's where optimizing for international search engines comes in. When done right, international SEO will help you to have the right content listed by the right search engines across countries, languages, and localizations, which will allow you to reach the right visitors with the right messages. In order to understand how your website will get found by global markets, let's take a step back and first review the general concept of search engine optimization. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of making improvements both on and off your websites to help search engines, discover, understand, and return to users the content on your website. These improvements are made with the ultimate goal of helping the right visitors find your products and services for the right reasons. At the end of the day, search engines are seeking to find the most relevant, authoritative content for their users, responding to the keywords that are being typed in. You'll find that the types of improvements that you can make and the continual work that you'll do to help search engines return your pages are no different for international SEO. And you can feel free to head over to our SEO Fundamentals course for a more in depth look. But in this course, we'll focus on what happens when we add that international element into the mix. And there are three core areas that you'll need to look at that are specific to marketing through global audiences. First, we'll look at the technical structures you can use to serve content to a global audience. You'll likely need to accommodate multiple languages, currencies, and even country-level regionalizations. And you'll need to think through whether you'll offer a single dynamic solution, different sites, a structure of sub folders, or perhaps use lots of sub domains. When we think about geographies, you'll want to think about where you'll be hosting your web properties, whether or not to use globally located content delivery networks, and even how you'll help local visitors discover content on different search engines around the world. Next, we'll focus in on some of the international On-page optimization strategies that you can use to ensure that your pages are understood by the proper search engines and the markets that they're targeting. We'll talk about the importance of languages and even special tags that you can deploy if you're translating and regionalizing multiple versions of the same content. The third component that we'll look at involves the offsite factors that help to establish and increase what's known as a website's authority. We'll see that a website's authority is determined by several factors, but one of the most important has long been the number of quality and relevant websites that are linking back to your pages. As search engines crawl the web, they view these links back to your pages as votes of confidence for that page, and the more votes with the better quality votes for a page, the more likely that a page will appear in search results for relevant queries. With international SEO, as we examine each of these components, we'll also need to take into consideration the different search landscapes, languages, and cultural considerations that vary from country to country around the world. In this context, focusing on how to set up your site to attract and retain a global audience, as well as how to adapt traditional search engine optimization tactics will play an important part in gaining international search engine exposure, and more importantly, attracting the most relevant visitors to your most relevant pages.