Managing an international website isn’t as straightforward as running a site focussed on a single local market.
There are several issues that need to be handled very precisely in order to maximise your traffic while maintaining a user friendly design.
Exceptions to every rule
Before we start it is important to realise that while this article discusses best practice solutions not every one will suit your website. Certainly if you already have a system that works it is wise to obtain professional advice before making any major changes.
Setting a homepage
Our recommendation for multinational sites is that they should be hosted on a .com domain and users from countries outside the main one should be forwarded to a sub-folder targeted to their country.
For example if the site is targeted towards a US market users from the UK visiting www.site.com are redirected to www.site.com/uk while users from the US remain at www.site.com.
Ideally www.site.co.uk should redirect in a search engine friendly manner to www.site.com/uk as should all other country specific domains.
We do not recommend that sites redirect users from deep content such as www.site.com/uk/product.html as the user is likely to want to visit the actual page they requested rather than being redirected.
Sites like FedEx offer a poor user experience as they require users to select their country as soon as they visit the homepage. Automatically choosing a country based on IP address would make the site far more efficient.
For details about how to setting this system up you might like to read our post about geo targeting on PHP sites.
Search engine optimisation
Using a sub-folder rather than a sub-domain or even a separate website means that any incoming links are going to help raise the overall trust of the entire domain. Using a different site for each country or redirecting to sub-domains isn’t going to make the best use of any incoming links.
It is important to remember that Googlebot and other search engine spiders are usually on a US IP address so unless your default setting is to send US users to www.site.com you might need to override the IP delivery rules for spiders. For example if the site was for a UK company but on a .com domain you might be redirecting all US users from www.site.com to www.site.com/us while keeping UK users on www.site.com. If you redirect Google to the US sub-folder it can make it hard for Google to index your real homepage.
Search engines use the following signals to determine the location of your website:
Hosting location (the location of your server)
Domain tld (eg .co.uk for the UK and .com for the US)
It is important to check that the actual location of your servers is reflected in their IP address using a tool like this one. I have seen UK hosts using IP addresses in the US and servers that are physically in the US resolving to India.
Ideally the site needs to be hosted in your main location of business, for example a UK site should be hosted in the UK and a US site in the US to ensure rankings in your local market across all search engines.
Recently Google allowed sites on non country specific domains such as .com or .net to assign a specific country (hence overriding the hosting location) using Webmaster Central. Here is what Google says about the issue:
If your site is aimed at users in a particular location, you can associate your site with a geographic target. We’ll use this information to help us determine how your site appears in location-specific search results.
Not only does this allow you to say that a US hosted .com site should actually be treated as a UK site but you can also set up specific sub-domains or sub-folders to target local markets.
For example Google allows you to say that www.site.com/fr is targeted to French users while www.site.com/uk is targeted to people in the UK. This means that every folder of your site should rank well in it’s target market in Google.
Yahoo and MSN are yet to implement this which is why we usually recommend hosting the main site in your target market. If traffic from a certain engine other than Google is important to you in a specific market it might pay to use a different solution such as a standalone site or sub-domain that is hosted in the target country.
Will from Distilledtalked to SEOmoz about these features recently in an interesting video about ranking sites in local markets.
Let your users switch versions
It is important to allow your users to switch to a different country version at any time and have this preference remembered (until they want to change it) using a cookie. There are several methods to do this but the best practice is usually to have a drop down list built with CSS and images of country flags. The user can click on the listing for their chosen location and easily switch versions.
An example of a good method of doing this is below from www.cj.com
The official W3 guidelines frown on the US of flags in this instance stating:
Do not use flag icons to indicate languages.
How to: Use text. See Example 23 for one illustration.
Discussion: Flags represent countries, not languages. Numerous countries use the same language as another country, and numerous countries have more than one official language. Flags don’t map onto these permutations.
The recommended solution is to use flags that match the geographical location of the service and its main intended audience. For example, a tourist site in Continental Europe would use a British flag Flag of the United Kingdom for English unless it was mostly targeted at American tourists, whereas a tourist site in the Americas would use a U.S. flag unless it was mostly targeted at Europeans.
I have seen the English flag Flag of the Kingdom of England used once, but would generally recommend against this seemingly neutral choice since few people outside the U.K. know the regional flags for England, Scotland, etc.
In summary, it is appropriate to use country flags as long as they are used alongside the name of the country and are used as a visual aid only. It is often appropriate to combine two countries together to aid the user experience. For example a UK site might let users choose US/Canada rather than offering different pages for each region.
Languages
So far we have been assuming that readers in a specific country will always want to read your site in the native language of that country. Clearly this isn’t always the case and this raises several issues.
First of all when your users select their location it is important to distinguish that from the language they want to use. For example a user in Spain might want to know about how your company operates in their local market but want to read the site in French. Do they click the French flag or the Spanish flag?
To choose between a small number of languages, I recommend listing the name of each language as a word, using each language’s own name for itself.
If language choice is supported by a site, I recommend providing a link to the choice on every single page since users often go directly to pages from search services or bookmarks without passing through the home page. Some sites put up a language choice page before the user can reach the home page, but I recommend against this if it is possible to determine a default language that will be used by a very large proportion of the users. Clicks and download time can be saved by going straight to a page for the main language as long as the home page has a very prominent (and internationally understood) entry for language change. Also, the pages for the various languages should have their own URLs so that users can bookmark the proper entry point and bypass language choice if they visit again.
In summary the recommendation is that you target sections of the site to customers in specific markets as well as offering that content in a range of languages. For example www.site.com/fr would be targeted towards French users and the default language would be French. User should be able to switch the language of this sub-folder to English and ideally some other European languages as well.
Duplicate content
Assuming all your sub-folders are in different languages the site should have no duplicate content issues.
The problem of duplicate content arises when a site has site.com, site.com/uk and site.com/au for the US, UK and Australia. All of these are in English so the content is likely to be much the same. Another issue that can cause duplicate content is when you translate sub-folders such as site.com/fr into English.
It isn’t simply a question of blocking indexing of this content as this won’t help your search engine rankings in specific countries. For example if you have English content in site.com/au that is exactly the same as the content on site.com/uk then it is tempting to remove one copy from the index but you will lose the rankings that this article had.
Our preferred solution is to hand craft every single page with content specific to the target country. This is costly but it is a “best practice” solution.
One of the biggest issues facing e-commerce sites & classified sites is something we call “product churn”. Every time a product or advert is deleted from the database it leaves a blank page causing problems for users and search engines.
Most platforms handle this issue pretty badly, the “solutions” range from blank pages, 404 pages, product not found pages that return 200 status OK headers and many more. My solution has been the same for years and it works very well to keep search traffic and make your users happy.
The first thing you need to make sure is that your expired product stays in the database, deleting products means deleting pages and that won’t help your Google traffic. Ideally you need to keep your listings live and in the Google index.
The key is to keep your page title, subject and content the same and simply add a note saying “This product is no longer available, below are some similar ones”. Make sure you don’t put the product name next to the words “no longer available” otherwise this phrase might show up in the search snippet and lower your CTR.
Once you have the page created you can add a section for related products by querying your database for the name of the expired item. Make sure you have some solution in the event you have no other matching items such as links to the top selling products in a category or even deals pulled from eBay.
Anther good tweak is to have a search box pre-populated with whatever query the user had entered into the search engine they used to find your site. That way they can easily search your site for the exact product they wanted in the first place.
Although Google is very good at identifying sitewide navigational elements the algorithm still works on the basis that the content at the top of the page is the most important. If you consider a website with 3 blocks of text on a page the first one is usually the one that has the most influence on rankings.
If you look at the text only cache of a Blogstorm article in Google you can see that the source code starts with a few navigational links and the alt tag behind the logo before quickly moving to the article h1 tag, then the article content, the comments and finally the navigation links. Using this structure helps Google understand what the page is about and will improve your rankings.
Luckily most blogs use a CSS template similar to this (some don’t use the h1 tag on the post pages very well) so blogs don’t need too much SEO work. The hard part is creating the same effect on e-commerce sites or content sites.
Moving content
One of the best (on site) ways to rank highly for a popular keyword is to have a 500 word article about that keyword right at the top of your homepage. The problem is that this isn’t practical for any commercial site. The solution (other than using hidden text) is to add some content at the top of the page in the source code and use CSS or JavaScript to make it display lower down when a user views the page.
Moving content is against the spirit of the Google Guidelines so if you are using a lot of other aggressive techniques then it is wise to steer clear of the methods discussed below. However for large brands using mainly ethical SEO methods the chances of failing a hand edit are zero.
Simple CSS
Mobile network Three uses an interesting method, you can see their homepage contains a block of text at the bottom of the page starting with the words “Mobile Phones”. Looking at the source code reveals that this bit of code is actually the very first thing Google sees on the page. Three makes the technique nice and easy to spot by labeling the div as “_ctl0_divSEO”.
JavaScript & CSS
Moving content with JavaScript is demonstrated very well at Shawn Hogans blog, Shawn could just use CSS to achieve the same effect but the method is very useful in situations where CSS would fail.
Looking at the source code of Shawns blog you can see the code starts with an empty div: <div id="sidebar"></div>
At the bottom of the page the sidebar is generated but is hidden using the CSS display:none; property.
Some JavaScript then populates the empty sidebar div with the contents of the hidden div. The result – search engines see the content before the sidebar.
This is a very good way of displaying a lot of content in an unobtrusively small space at the top of your homepage. The idea is that you use a JavaScript news ticker or scroller at the very top of your page and then add noscript tags directly below it with the same content as the ticker.
In theory you can add anything to the noscript tags but if it is at all different to the actual content you risk failing a hand edit. Sometimes adding a lot of text in a noscript tag isn’t a good idea in which case you can use a CSS scroller to achieve much the same effect (getting a lot of text heavy content at the top of your page without pushing the commercial elements too far down).
Make sure you give users a way out of geo targeting
One afternoon I went to the internet cafe and loaded up gmail.com to find it was in Arabic, even after I logged in. Next I went to google.co.uk and that was also in Arabic. Managed to find a link to google.com in English at which point Google figured out what I wanted and gave me a cookie to remember. Sure enough next time I visited Gmail it loaded up in English for me. Why, after years of sending email in English, does Gmail suddenly think I can read Arabic? Lots of sites have nice flags at the top to change languages. I often thought this was overkill and the process could be done automatically but my experience was that a flag would have been very useful.
Netvibes proved to be totally impossible to use because they don’t offer a link to an English version.
Back to basics
On arrival at our hotel everything was very nice but the room wasn’t particularly clean. A couple of days later the cleaner spent 20 minutes creating a very nice rose out of towels before asking for a tip. The rose was an interesting touch but I would have been quite happy to tip him just for keeping the room clean.
A lot of companies provide very poor service so it is often quite easy to stand out simply by doing your job. Make sure you get the basics right and don’t try to offer fancy services and features unless you have your core product 100% perfect.
Keep pages simple
Netvibes & Gmail both crashed IE6. Even if your users are on broadband the number of scripts running on your pages might be a bit much for older browsers and PC’s to cope with.
Don’t waste time promoting low quality content
The homepage of all the computers in the local internet cafe was a low quality web directory rife with spyware. Internet cafe users who pay by the hour are not looking to browse the web they are looking for Hotmail, MSN, Facebook, Myspace and in my case Gmail. Why would them being forced to visit a web directory help anybody?
Marketing a low quality website is a waste of time. Rather than spending money promoting your site it is more cost effective to make it a useful resource that will offer a good user experience.
Don’t hassle your customers
When you visit a country such as Egypt and Tunisia the experience of shopping is a lot like visiting a spam website. As you walk in the door you are bombarded with salesman desperate to sell you something until you are forced to run away from the shop. On occasion they even stand in front of potential customers to try and stop them from leaving. The salesmen don’t seem to understand they just chased me and my money out of their shop when I was going to buy something, it seems they feel the need to pile on the pressure to make a sale.
While it is important to remember to design websites in a way that makes it simple for your customers to make a purchase or subscribe to an RSS feed it is sometimes more important just to let them do what they want. Bombarding users with adverts and buttons isn’t going to help you gain customers. How many times have you visited a blog and not been able to figure out how to subscribe? Have you ever subscribed because somebody asked you lots of times?
Don’t confuse people
One of the most confusing aspects of Egypt was the fact people kept giving me change in a mixture of English pounds, American dollars and Egyptian pounds. Try working out your change in three currencies and deciding whether the barman has short changed you after a few glasses of fake Stella and you know what I mean.
Offering complicated service is fine as long as you take the time to explain it to your customers. Some bar staff counted out the change as they gave it to me while others handed over a ball of screwed up notes. Think about whether your website takes the time to explain, using nice graphics, how to use the difficult features. Ask a few internet novices to use the site and see what they say.
James Pople, who runs a building contractor firm in Tunbridge Wells, is not convinced that a website is an essential tool for business success. Nine months after his website went live, he insists it has not generated a single phone call from a customer.
Wow, not a single phone call. Lets take a look at his website to see why.
Ahh yes, it requires both JavaScript and Flash to navigate making it totally impossible for the search engines to index.
So, Mr Pople, it is not surprising that your site hasn’t generated any business because nobody can find it.
It’s like having a party and expecting people to magically find the venue without telling anybody where it is.
I think, although your site doesn’t make it very clear, that you design and construct buildings. How much business would you get if you ranked number 1 when somebody searched for design construction? I’m guessing quite a lot.
Despite not ranking for it’s own name on Google*, online takeaway website hungryhouse.co.uk won £100,000 of funding tonight from 2 of the Dragons on the BBC’s Dragons Den.
Duncan Bannatyne and James Caan invested for a performance related stake of 25% each with a 20% stake to be returned if targets are hit.
The site is still very new and doesn’t cover many areas outside London but it’s interesting to see Dragons investing in affiliate sites again, even one like this where the potential revenue is only 9% of a sale which probably averages around £15.
What do you think about the site?
* Since the program finished 2 hours ago the site has come from nowhere to 1st for the term “hungry house”. Google using query and toolbar data to correct itself in real time?
Yesterday I signed up to a golf newsletter and the following email arrived in my inbox:
Should a website bother to cater for people in this way? The space would have been much better used to show me some latest offers or write a short paragraph about the company.
I’ve successfully managed to navigate to their website and sign up to a newsletter as well as being able to read their email so surely I can manage to click on a link?
In 2007 websites shouldn’t be trying to teach people how to use the internet.
That post has had over 30,000 readers so far so it must have sent a lot of traffic to the sites involved but only Ling has responded with a comment to show she cares about her online reputation.
Ling, I’m not saying you should change your design entirely, but why not put some click tracking software (use Google Analytics onClick) on all your links so you can see which people are clicking on and which are being missed. I guarantee that making your site easier to navigate will increase sales.
How many times a day do you check your website is working? These website uptime monitors check the status of your website up to 96 times per day and send you an email or even an SMS when the site goes down.
A lot of webmasters are happy to trust the reliability figures quoted by their hosting company but using an uptime monitor is a great way to check you really are getting what you pay for. These tools are also great for testing out a potential new host before you switch – find a site thats using the host you want to test and run the uptime monitor on that rather than your own.
Although it doesn’t look like the best designed website my personal favourite is the Basic State service. It’s totally free and checks a range of stats every 15 minutes, all day, every day. At the end of each day it sends a summary and also sends an email if your site ever goes down.
Basic State even plots graphs of your data so you can see whether your host is performing better or worse over time. Thanks to Tim from SEO Leeds for tipping me off about this.
Next on the list is Host Tracker which offers to ping your site every 30 minutes if you use the free account and up to every minute on the Pro package. It also allows you to receive error notifications both to your Email, ICQ, GTalk or cell-phone via SMS and has a 30 day free trial so you can test before you buy.
http://mon.itor.us is one of the better designed services and is a spin off from monitis.com which is a very cool performance research and web analytics company offering charts and graphs of pretty much every aspect of your website. The graphs can even be embedded in your iGoogle homepage. The AJAX dashboard of mon.itor.us is well designed and the system offers visitor tracking as well as uptime monitoring & alerts.
Another service offering a free basic level package with the ability to upgrade to a premium service is Site Uptime. With multiple monitoring servers around the world they promise to test your site every 30 minutes (free version) and every 5 minutes if you upgrade to the Advanced Plan at a reasonable $10 per month.
Finally we come to Pingdom, which is probably the most advanced tool and isn’t actually a free solution. However they do offer a 30 day free trial so I decided to include them in this list. Pingdom is a more advanced service and they are a perfect way to test out a new host, simply use their free trial for the first month to see if your hosting is working as expected and then cancel your account. Or, if you really like them, upgrade to a paid account.
Do you ever open up a really badly designed website and wish you hadn’t? I’ve had the misfortune to visit a few shocking sites recently and here is a list of the very worst. If you are a designer feel free to send them an email offering your services.
If your website is on this list please don’t be offended, although you may wish to consider a redesign.
Top of our list and probably the worst of the bunch is this UK insurance company. Not content with using yellow and pale green on the same page they have made the page refresh every single second just so you don’t miss it. Also check out the quality pages such as this one with more html errors (check the title tag) than you can count. Extra points granted due to the waste of a good domain name.
Its not really clear what (or who) Franz is but you won’t miss that “Home” button. The title is nice and descriptive as well.
MSY is an Australian technology company boasting “more than 10 years in the computer industry”. Unfortunately their definition of “computer industry” clearly doesn’t encompass web design as pages such as this one selling Flash memory and other assorted products demonstrates.
Seriously this is painful to watch. Would you hire VF Designer?
This online ministry website seems to think that making people blind will help spread the faith. They even helpfully provide a series of well designed banners for you to use when you link to them.
This image heavy Norwegian gadget site has more pictures than flickr and takes an age to load thanks to the html image resizing. It didn’t seem to render properly in any of my browsers.
Another site wasting a great domain name is 00.com which utilises the least user friendly Flash navigation system we have had the pleasure to use.
Web Wizz have been given the dubious honour of having designed two sites on the list. Lets hope www.posture.co.uk is suitably pleased with the design work. Helpfully Web Wizz will register a domain name for just £89.99 initially, plus £2 per month.
Ling’s Cars was featured recently on the BBC’s Dragons Den program and really tries hard to provide a personal touch to her car leasing website. Unfortunately this means ignoring a few of the user friendly features on more conventional sites. Just try navigating round a few pages and you will see that the mass of information at the top isn’t just on the homepage, its on all the pages.
Helpfully Ling has created a nice guide on how you should be building your site:
Most business make mistake of paying a company to build page, without learning. Learn! Modify, change. Don’t pay the idiots to do this, do it yourself. Treat webpage like business office or shop. If you want to move a desk in office you move it. Put calendar on wall, you put. Do the same on website. Do every day. So simple. All your customers can see this. They get “feeling” from it.
