I thought it would be useful to give people a feel for the most typical errors organisations make - if we voted for the number one worst internatioal error! Enjoy!

Andy

Certainly IP address redirects, I agree with that. Second is keyword and ad copy translation from English to another language using an auto translation tool.

I've voted auto-translation. Though even professional translation can be not good enough! Web site is not a book - it's not only sense that counts, especially if it's a business site. All texts should be completely rewritten by native people from same industry.
IMHO

A great way to ensure a complete mess is to use only a .com andthen serve the same content for several countries. Eg: UK, Ireland, India, US, etc who all might have an English page, would be served as different pages but with the exact same, duplicate content. It happens all too often..

Autotranslation for sure. It renders content unreadable for the regular user.

Ok so are you guys saying that if a web site is translated in multiple languages using only a .com, that's just not the best way to go about it. Right?

Let's say a website only has a .com, and it would like multilingual SEO done, what would be the best way to go about it?

Sorry if I'm going off topic here...

THANKS

no,
I'm not right on that one - you can use a .com for all your languages - it can work well for you, it will depend on how competitive your markets are locally, and just how important it is for you (= how much you can afford to spend) for that extra visibility if you believe you really need it.

In this case your best bet is to go with local TLDs each having unique content for every language and that can be a challenge, especially when you are talking about local markets speaking English (USA, UK AUSTRALIA, IRELAND etc.) or Spanish (Spain and all Central/South American countries, Mexico ... ) or Portuguese for that matter.

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

Ok I see thanks for that feedback. It depends on the keyword competition.

However, I understand that Google gives priority to local Domains when a local search is done. Am I right on my last post when I said, "not the best way to go about it."?

Therefore the best possible way to really optimize for an international audience is using local domains when there is heavy competition for a given keyword.

in principle this is correct and easier said than done - setting up TLD in different languages, jeeping them all up to date, upgrading ... it's not that easy, not to mention problems related to content duplication issues when addressing different markets using the same language ... not an easy (or inexpensive) chore !

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo