Posted by Tom Walker in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) | 2 comments
International Ranking Factors: URLs – What you NEED to know!
Over the coming weeks I will be writing a series of posts pertaining to international ranking factors which will tell you everything you need to know to make your website more visible globally. Since this topic is just too large to cover in one post I felt it was better to break things down a little rather than puddle your brains with page after page of information. So, let’s get to it!
After much deliberation I decided it was best to start with URLs as this is a great way to get your international SEO strategy off the ground. Your URLs should not only tell the search engine spiders what is the most important content on your site but also what countries and languages your site might be relevant to.
The Importance of the CC TLD
There are a number signs that are indicative of a site being relevant for international content, and your top level country code domain is the most important of these (the location of your server is another, but that’s a whole separate post). You can liken the CC TLD to the difference between local information regarding counties. I will take the town of Preston in Yorkshire as an example. If I just told someone to head to Preston there’s a pretty good chance they would head to Preston in Lancashire. Without the extra information related to the location (Yorkshire or Lancashire) then there is no way to be sure which Preston I am talking about. Portuguese is not always Portuguese. The context of a word in Brazil can mean something completely different than it means in Portugal. By aiding search engines in understanding the location of the website’s content, they can better grasp how relevant your website it to a particular search query.
The recommended URL structure for Brazil would be:
“www.example.com.br”
You can see a list of the internationally accepted TLD extensions by visiting the official IANA website.
Differentiating Between Languages
Displaying content in its correct language is also a major factor. This becomes more important when you are catering for countries with numerous languages (i.e. Brazil). The primary page should always be set to display in the official language of that country. Taking Brazil as an example, the homepage language should be set to Portuguese and sub-domains should be used for other languages e.g.
Brazil’s Primary URL: www.example.com.br
Brazil’s Spanish URL: es.example.com.br
Building your site with the correct HTML language syntax will assist the search engine spiders in indentifying and categorising the language of your sites content. You should add this tag inside the <html> area at the top of any webpage. Below is the correct tag for a site in Portuguese.
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=”pt”>
Directory Taxonomy
How you label and organise your content on your website is vitally important. It will increase usability and search engines use directory name and location to quantify the relevancy of a particular page. Site hierarchy should follow search query intent or replicate how the user searches the websites content. For instance if a site directory is talking about “vacuum cleaners”, then you would name the directory “vacuum-cleaners” rather than “products”. You should follow this methodology for every sub-directory as well e.g. example.com/vacuum-cleaners/upright-vacuums/model-123.html.
It is also best to check whether you are using the correct regional term. Take the term “vacuum cleaners”; they are quite often referred to as “hoovers”. The Google Keyword Tool is perfect for research in this area. You can choose your keyword within the desired country and determine what the majority of the population searches for when looking for the content in question.
Here are some other basic rules to following when looking at URL structures.
- Hyphens are better than underscores
- Try to keep your structure to 3 directories or lower: www.example.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/page.html
- Always use standard code extensions – html, asp, aspx, php, etc.
- Try to avoid session ID’s: if they are really required implement the <rel=canonical> tag to try and reduce any duplicate content
Well that’s all for now folks, as I said earlier I will be revisiting this topic as there is far more ground to cover here so until the next installment, goodbye.
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- Catch Of The Week | Featured Articles | WMpS Blog - Surfing The Digital Wave - [...] This week’s CotW is from the SEO department relating to international SEO and in particular international Urls. [...]
Great info, I look forward to future topics for International Ranking Factors!
Likewise! This is not a particular area that I’ve looked at from an SEO perspective before, it’s nice to get some info on the subject.