Thanks for your comment,
David

To answer your question, I doubt it’s the end of the world if you don’t host in the country you’re targeting, but the main idea here is to send as many signals to the search engines as possible about the geo-targeting of your site.

Hope that helps!
David

David

Thanks much for your kind words and for participating here on the Portent blog, I do appreciate that.

David

As with all things SEO, international or otherwise, there are so many “moving parts” to keep track of it can be quite head-spinning sometimes. I’m glad you found this info helpful to you and thanks for your comment here.

David

Nice post, but there are a few missing points about international Seo:

- Ip is becoming irrelevant, since more and more providers offer cloud services. Of course that does NOT include Yandex and Baidu, which are a different case.

- Country level domain: good, just remember that Belgian TLD are are .be, not .com.be. And also remember that some registrar require to have a physical office inside the country in order to have a local domain. So check if the domain is available before starting your marketing strategy! (it happens everytime in particular dealing with corporate-level clients !)

- How to tell google to serve the correct language: the correct tag is hreflang and it’s described here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 also the use of rel=alternate should be recommended.

- language: some countries use the same language (germany and austria), some countries used more than one (like the Suisse ). Using only the country selector of google webmaster tool is not always the best option.

- link building and local citations: do not give for granted that there will be many local business directory. In italy for example there’s probably one. We don’t have a centralized local provider. Our yellow pages have filed for bankruptcy last week, so there will be zero centralized local provider of addresses.

Every market should be treated as unique and deserves a specific strategy.
Whoever approaches another country hoping to use the same old school strategies used in the USA is gonna be bloody disappointed… if they have me as local counterpart, it’s gonna be gruesome: i fear nobody :D I don’t care if you have 100 SEOs and a gazillion of revenues, if you are wrong i’m gonna tell everything to the client. (it happened. I still can’t remove the blood from the keyboard)

And also keep in mind that a lot of possible customers are not using google at all: if you are salivating over russians or chinese millionaires, you should really pay a LOT more attention.

have a nice day!