Will Hattman

International SEO is a complex affair that demands reckoning with questions far beyond the scope of traditional SEO. First, there are the concrete matters of where your product or service is sold, and which languages your company offers customer support in. Beyond that lie more nuanced considerations like the level of locality at which you want to be competitive in search within each country, the extent to which your product (or at least your branding) differs from country to country, and the breadth of geographical distribution of your site’s servers.

These considerations, along with the others that spiral out from them, will inform your optimal web infrastructure, your messaging, and nearly everything else, and accordingly they’ll have to be hammered out carefully over the course of conversations with just about every department you’ve got. [If you’re starting down this road in earnest right now, do yourself a favor and look to this post from Aleyda Solis, by consensus the world’s foremost expert on the subject, on State of Digital, then move on to the checklist post she wrote for Moz as often as you need to.]

Once you’ve gotten those questions answered, and you’ve finally got a site (or network of sites) that covers your entire global customer base, there will be this one last — crucial but comparatively simple — step: setting up your hreflang tags. Introduced in 2010 by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the hreflang tag is an HTML element that webmasters can use to tell search engines what language and country a given page is intended for, and where (if anywhere) its translations or equivalents for other countries can be found. Failure to use them properly could result in Google serving up the wrong version of a page to a particular location, or placing translations of the same page in competition with one another for rankings within the same area. So while hreflang tags aren’t a panacea for international SEO, the efforts you make in addressing all the big-picture concerns from the above paragraph will be fruitless without them. And compared to all of the stuff in the above paragraph, they’re relatively simple. So, in the interest of keeping to my 10-minute promise, let’s assume that you’ve got all that stuff figured out already, and skip to this, your last step. [Read more…] about A 10-Minute Hreflang Tag Tutorial

Because “educator” is among the many hats that someone in our line of work must wear on any given day, I really cherish those moments of role-reversal when I find one of my clients educating me. It brings a welcome balance to the relationship and a dose of the kind of humility that all anointed “experts” should take from time to time. In a neighboring spirit, I also enjoy those moments when I discover some novel feature or quirk of one of the tools I commonly use that empowers me with a new perspective on the tool and makes me a more capable user.

In January, on one of UpBuild’s first days back following the holidays, I had a doozy of a day that gave me both of these experiences in quick succession. First, a client taught me something about SEO that I didn’t know. Then, in seeking to apply the new wisdom with the pertinent toolkit, I immediately encountered a problem that I’d never seen before. Then, a small amount of research online led me to a solution to that problem, granting me a new and deeper understanding of the toolkit along the way. Any day full of learning like that is worth remembering. If what you learned should be shared, it’s worth blogging about too. So, in that spirit, welcome! [Read more…] about How to Combine Multiple Schema.org Itemtype Declarations in a Single Script