Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer's Guide to SEO

Chapter 12. Foreign Language SEO

Incidentally, the authors of this book are from two different countries. Jaimie is from the United States and speaks English, along with some Hebrew and Spanish. Cristian is from Romania and speaks Romanian, English, and some French. Why does this matter? There are concerns — both from a language angle, as well as some interesting technical caveats when one decides to target foreign users with search engine marketing. This chapter reviews some of the most pertinent factors in foreign language search engine optimization.

As far as this book is concerned, "foreign" refers to anything other than the United States because this book is published in the United States. We consider the UK to be foreign as well; and UK English is a different language dialect, at least academically.

The Internet is a globalized economy. Web sites can be hosted and contain anything that the author would like. Users are free to peruse pages or order items from any country. Regardless, for the most part, a user residing in the United States would like to see widgets from the United States. And a user in Romania would like to see widgets from Romania. It is also likely that a user in England would prefer to see products from England, not the United States — regardless of the language being substantially the same. There are some exceptions, but in general, to enhance user experience, a search engine may treat web sites from the same region in the same language as the user preferentially. ...