Geotargeting has been available since *005 but recently the SERP's are showing greater integrating into their results as Google strives to deliver more relevant end-user results. Many gaming, as well as other sectors, website are targeting more than one geographical country/region *** language. There are many ways to tackle this. If you are targeting more than one language its always best to buy the TLD (Top Level Domain like .be ,.de ,.nl or even .co.nz) If that's not possible, go to Webmaster Central Tools within your account *** be sure the geographical setting is placed on; no, I do not wish to set a georgraphical target. This way Google will show your website when the end-user speaks the relative language regardless of his location, which is determined either by his search term, or the manual setting all non-US based searches on Google offering language based results. This is well worth the investment to hire a translator to convert your content, *** its a lot cheaper than paying for new language-based content to be created by someone that may not know the industry.

The other option is that if you own a .com, .net, .org or any other non-country based URL extension, you can create top level directories such as /br/ /nl/ /es/ *** once you verify the site is yours via WMC Google will automatically add the subdirectories without needing to individually verify them like you have to with subdomains. You can still do this on country specific subdirectories, but TLD's *** subdomains with geotargeting set will always be stronger.

The last option is to create subdomains such as be.yoursite.com, es.yoursite or nl.yoursite.com (this will not work for country specific TLD's). You can copy *** translate the content from your main site without drawing any penalties from the search engines, just as you can if it was exactly the same content. If its within the same site you will not be penalised. For those of you in the US, UK, AUS, NZ with non-country based TLD's; Once you have these in place, personally I would host them in the target country, but if your unable to for whatever reason, still go into WMC *** get a verification code for each *** verify site ownership. (this is because Google sees subdomains as a separate website) Once you have done this go into WMC Tools *** set the geographic region for each subdomain site. When an end-user selects the "page from _____" option you will rank much higher than if you implemented the subdirectory option above.

In a perfect world I would not only create subdirectories for each targeted language on my main .com/.net/.info site, but, but I would also create subdomains with their respective languages *** set geotargeting for the respective country. After you have done this, create a sitemap *** manually submit it to all the engines. One last thing – do not use geotargeting for language. This is the reason I recommended subdirectories. Google will find them *** deliver them higher in the result when the language preference is selected by an end-user prior to their query. If you were to use geographical targeting you would miss out on any person searching for language based results in a foreign county with a foreign IP.

This is significant because the foreign based search for geographical *** language based is very soft right now. Implementing these tactics will help you to capture some of this market.

GaryTheScubaGuy