Some blogs expect to have an international audience, but other blogs find this to be a surprise. Whatever the case may be, it is important to make sure that your website is truly optimized for not only foreign search engines, but foreign readers. In many cases you will find that optimization for these search engines is very similar to optimizing for Google, but it can be a bit more difficult for someone who is unfamiliar with a language or culture.
Different Foreign Search Engines
There are hundreds of different search engines that exist in our world today, and it is important to understand that there are really two different ways to look at foreign search engines: Google and other search engines that are used in foreign countries and then engines that are not based in the U.S. In general, many of the foreign search engines outside of the U.S. manually rank sites, so it’s usually worth the time of an American to focus on optimization for sites that were originally U.S. based.
Below are a few of the most popular search engines in different parts of the world:
- Japanese – Yahoo Japan is the most popular search engine in Japan, but some also use the Japanese based search engine, DragonField.
- German – Germans sometimes use the engine Aladin or Fireball, but many still use American search engines such as AltaVista Germany.
- China – This country largely uses Baidu, but a site should have a Chinese domain name and hosted in the country, so it’s tough to optimize for this engine.
- Russia – Yandex is commonly used in Russia, and this search engine has many of the same ranking rules that Google employs.
- French – Voila is one of the biggest search engines for the French, although Yahoo France is a close second.
Top 5 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Foreign Search Engines
Although the way in which you optimize your site for a foreign search engine will differ depending on the search engine you’re targeting, there are a few things that remain consistent across the board. For those who aren’t entirely sure where to begin, there are a few standard things you can do:
- Translation – This is obviously one of the biggest things that you can do to help give you some pull in another language. You can set up a translation service on your site to make it easy for anyone to translate your blog. However, a translation service will not always be exactly correct, so human translation is preferred.
- Hosting/IP – Many foreign search engines look at the host location, or IP, of websites in order to make sure users are getting relevant results. It isn’t always possible to get your website hosted in another country, although this would be ideal, so will want to work through Google to roll out your website globally.
- Directories – Registering your website to appear in foreign directories is a great start to getting the backlinks you need to rank well (on the majority of foreign search engines).