Social networking in 2008 has spread like fire worldwide but the most interesting factor to highlight is that almost half the list of the most searched social media sites are based outside of the U.S.

Let’s take a look at the Social media penetration in China. Within the top 10 most popular searches we can find online sharing video channels such as Youtube, Youku or Tudou. We can see that video marketing techniques could be very effective in that market.

In India, Youtube, Facebook, Orkut (which is the most popular Social networking site there) populate both the list of most searched and fastest rising queries. In Brazil, Orkut is the most popular query rivalling with football related information and online games.

Interestingly enough, European countries with high number of internet users behave very differently in the popularity of social media sites. In Germany, Facebook shows up within the top 10 of fastest rising terms but also Yasni, a site to find out about personal social media data, Jappy, another local social network, as well as StudiVZ and Schuler VZ. However, Italians seem to adopt facebook as their one and only social network and although French rate Facebook and their local social medias source Skyrock as very popular, what really dominates the top 10 are music related sites. On the other side of the spectrum, Spain has 8 social media related sites in the top 10 of fastest rising terms in 2008.

In social media, importance of early adopters is paramount since they are the force that make the sites go viral. After a year when the role of social media has started to be accepted as a window of opportunity to tap into the Internet audience in their points of communication, we can say without risk that the Internet is now the Social media Internet, and that despite cultural disparities and degrees of adoption, the Internet world is shifting to more collaborative ways of communication. Companies like Facebook have seen the opportunity, and plenty of other local sites have got on the bandwagon of social media interaction, catering for the needs of their local audience.

Will 2009 be the time of the monetisation attempts of all those companies? Will many of them be weeded out by the ubiquitous Facebook or they will survive with their local approach? I will keep you posted.

Just to put things into perspective; Brazil is the ninth-largest Internet market worldwide, with 27.7 million users, while Mexico ranks 14th, with 12.5 million users. Brazil goes ahead of such countries as South Korea, Canada, Italy and Spain, while Mexico ranks ahead of The Netherlands. The Brazilian economy is predicted to grow a bit more than a 1% for this year, which although meager, is still much better than most of European markets.

The great opportunity about targeting South America as a prospective online market is that your optimisation efforts only need to focus on two main languages, Spanish and Portuguese. By using native speakers that comprehend the special peculiarities of the Latin market a business can expand in the continent with a reasonably little investment.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

As in any new more advanced SEO disciplines that are catching on, lots of dilettante practitioners try to capitalise on the popularity of the new concepts. That is the candid version of the story. The more harsh and probably honest version is that plenty of snake oil salesmen and scammers are starting to target the multilingual arena.

There are several signs to try to spot when it comes down to separating the wheat from the chaff in the international search field. Those are some of the most conspicuous :

1. Translation companies doing website localisation and SEO. Nothing again translation companies. They have their market and they work very well for legal documents, business translation and the like. However, translating is not localising.  In order to localise a website in other language you need to be a native speaker first and an Internet marketer second. More than translating, localising is creative copywriting, requires keyword research abilities and on-page SEO expertise. It is the similar issue that a few years ago happened with webdesign companies trying to get on the SEO wagon. It didn’t work very well.
2. Empty promises. “We promise High SERP rankings”. One of this translation companies offering Multilingual SEO approached us recently asking us for help. Obviously they didn’t have the know-how to do things by themselves so they were pursuing a partnership. When we mentioned the limitations of any SEO work they turned around in a rage mentioning the sentence above. Anyone who has been in this industry for a while knows that you can’t guarantee rankings.With personalized search more and more ingrained in search engines algorithms and increasing competition for generic terms, SEO is a different discipline now that it was 2 years ago. Vacuous promises are not only deceiving but irresponsible. Funnily enough, this particular company’s site was being outranked by one of our clients for the main keywords targeted by them on the main page, keywords that were not even our main goal for our client. It is clear that some companys come “talk the talk” but can they “walk the walk”?
3. Lack of basic insight about the international markets. There is a company in the US that has been lately strongly focusing on promoting their multilingual search services.  The on-page overoptimisation of multilingual seo related key phrases is sometimes hard to digest on their blog posts. However, keyword stuffing is not their main problem.  Stating things like that consumers speak English in Spain but shop in Spanish is gross ignorance and makes me feel embarrased for them.
   As a Spanish native myself, I can guarantee that very little people speak English even within business environments, as anybody going to Spain for holidays can certify, and although we claim to be fluent in our CVs very few people has basic conversational English skills. This kind of misleading information coming from an allegedly expert in the subject matter can harm more than ignorance when it comes down to targeting international markets.
4. Lack of basic International SEO knowledge. A SEO company offering multilingual services in the UK, that recently got a major deal with a big american company to provide their services in different languages, mentioned in its corporative blog, not too long ago, that to have a local domain name and local IP address in order to list on local search engines wasn’t important. Vanessa Fox, previous Google Engineer, explains very clearly how search engines determine location relevant search results, putting at the top of her list country specific local domains. This is something that is consensual belief for all the experts in International search engines matters, which leaves this firm in a very bad place.
5. “We will submit your site to thousands of local search engines”. That is a classic. Not much to mention about that. Run for the hills if that is part of the promotional materials of a multilingual search marketing company.
6. One thousand links and SEO for £100/100€. Multilingual search marketing is difficult. It requires not only general market expertise but also linguistic abilities and insight on search engines and platforms that go beyond Google and Yahoo. If companies in the US charge £750/h for just consultancy add all this additional expertise to the equation. Anyone who claim to be able to optimise and manage multilingual campaigns online for those prices are just going to take your money and run.
7. Local offices worldwide. That is a tough one. Although not being necessarily a bad thing, having to synchronise people from different locations, working cultures, timetables, time zones, different command of the English language, etc is a challenging endeavour.
   Additionally, in order to be able to combine and integrate efforts from different agencies across the world the companies need to make an additional investment if the results are meant to be cohesive enough for the project brand. Having a multilingual, multidisciplinar team under the same roof that can bounce ideas and add different insights is a much more cost effective approach.

There are no standards in the SEO industry and when we dig into more specialised search marketing disciplines the needs for knowing exactly what is value for money is essential if you don’t want to end in the hands of industry hustlers.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

Spanish Internet users search to learn more about product and services (80 %). Internet penetration in Spain has grown to the 52%, overtaking countries such as Latvia, Lithuania. Slovakia or Czech Republic, in order to reach the 17th position in Europe according to Fundación Orange. The annual report that displays data from 2007 also highlight that, although ecommerce is growing in Spain, is still far behind from the European average of 23% of the population purchasing goods online. The report sets the Spanish figure on 13% in 2007.

1. Main Spanish Search Engines. Google is the number one property in search. There is not updated official data coming from the AIMC about Search Engines Share Market but the Foundation Orange seems to give a prominent first position to Google.es (95 to 97%), followed by MSN that grew to reach the second position with a meagre 3% and Yahoo plummeting with marginal percentages.
2. Website analytics in Spain. Google analytics is the tool more utilized, with a staggering share market of 75%. 50% of all companies don’t use any web analytics tool, they don’t have anyone dedicated to Web Analytics and only the few companies that use a paid analytics tool hire anyone to manage it.Source: SegundaEncuesta del Estado de la Analitica Web en España.
3. Biggest sites for social media in Spain (social networking, social bookmarking, news sites, etc) Youtube seems to be the social media site most visited by the Spaniards with 40% of the Internet population using it on a regular basis. However, Spanish users don´t generate as much content as other European users, with a little 7% of the content present in Youtube. That opens a window of opportunity to clever marketers to get much more visibility with viral video campaigns given the lack of competition. Having said that Spain is ahead of de Germany, France and Italy in terms of video generation and consumption. Podcast download, participation in Social networks such as Facebook, Myspace, Neurona, Linkedin or Tuenti, or blogs creation, are also activities carried out by Spanish users with a 20% of the total Internet audience, only behind the UK. Myspace seems to have the biggest social network share market with 34% but it is followed closely by facebook, hi.com and sonico.com. Tuenti.com a Spanish specific social media network has got a big buzz lately, despite being around since 2006 and now has more visitors than facebook and possesses a very high level of participation. You can see from Google Trends the popularity of the site in terms of traffic:
   Google Trends for Websites: tuenti.com, facebook.com, hi5.com, sonico.com Spanish equivalent of Digg, social news site, is Meneame.net , very popular.
4. Search algorithmic differences in Spanish for the main Search Engines. Since Google has such a huge share market in Spain I will talk about the algorithmic differences with Google.com and Google.es, but I believe this could be extrapolated to any country specific Google domain.It has been largely debated that TrustRank has less impact in country specific Google versions than in Google.com. That means that newly created sites would have more probabilities to rank well in country specific Googles than in Google.com. Keyword rich domains seem to have a bigger impact on international versions of Google than in Google.com.Obviously, country specific local domains (.es) are prioritized in SERPs from Google country specific version in detriment of .com.Spam filters work much worse in other languages Google versions than in Google. You can get away with more dodgy stuff internationally, not that I would recommend it.I think Google is increasingly investing on mastering the nuances of different languages so its algorithm can serve the best results to a wider international non english speaker audience. However, I think that stemming algorithms, and I also have the experience to prove this, of course, don’t work so well in romanic languages. As a result, I believe that exact phrase match within content might have more weight in country specific Googles than in .com.

Conclusions:

• Internet penetration in  Spain is rapidly increasing. A 250% since 2001.
• Ecommerce is still in its infancy in Spain. Factors such as lack of trust or reliance on more traditional channels can be argued although a big increase is likely to occur.
• Social media is the fastest growing sector and the figures are above more internet developed countries like Germany, France or Italy only behind UK.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

For numerous clients sites that have been trying to address a more international audience we have discovered that disparities of rankings between Google.com and Google.co.uk are very common, even if the sites in question have a British IP address. Ranking better in Google.com for sites hosted in UK is a kind of glitch not unusual and traditionally UK sites have been disappearing inappropriately for Google.co.uk top rankings in benefit of Google.com. The algorithms are slightly different and the language commonalty doesn’t help. There is an interesting case of a .co.uk site about a small village in England that ranks much better in Google.com than in Google.co.uk despite the neutral domain code termination (.org) . After a deluge of complaints from British webmasters about this, Matt Cutts from Google had to lay out an official response that underlined the importance of the local domain.

We expererienced this very problem with a B2B client that was ranking very highly for very (VERY) competitive keywords in Google.com and nowhere near the top 50 in Google.co.uk. Being a company based in London, that was certainly hurting their revenue and they couldn’t work out why, since the domain (although a .com) was hosted in UK.

We suggested a few guidelines and a two-pronged strategy consisting of on-page/site wide additions and off-page tactics. We predicted that those changes would affect the geo-targeting in a reasonable period of time but the tactics took a while to make an effect. It is likely, and there is a buzz in Google groups about it, that google is working on tweaking their G-UK algo to fix this problem but we shouldn’t count with it.

On site suggestions

1. Use an address within the country . Register to local business center. The caveat is that the client didn’t have a physical location in UK. We suggested to use the location of their virtual office in Central London as a point of reference.

2. Use localised meta-data  for country, language and geographical location on the site pages:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”EN-GB”>
<meta name=”country” content=”United Kingdom”>
<meta name=”geo.country” content=”GB” />
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”51.52171-0.14228″ /> The 51.52171-0.14228(latitude;longtitude)
<meta name=”ICBM” content=”51.52171-0.14228″ />

These meta tags haven’t proved to be necessary to geolocalise sites but it was worth trying.

3. Use HTML address tags in the site pages. The content in the address tag will show up on the page .

<ADDRESS>Client address.<BR />
London Post Code, United Kingdom.</ADDRESS>

Again there is no conclusive evidence of this making a difference but some people had reported good results so it was worth trying.

Off-site suggestions

We analysed thoroughly the client linking profile and found out that only less than a hundred unique .co.uk domains were linking to the site out of the 15000 links that Yahoo indexed. Having more links from UK based sites should logically improve rankings for Google.co.uk as well as reinforce localisation.  We launched a specific link building campaign targeting UK sites and using anchor text with “UK” as the very first keyword. f.e “UK [client niche] services“.The idea was to emphasize the location, UK, to see if that could have an impact on geolocalisation issues.

Conclusions

After a few months the site was ranking for 68 new entries within the top 200 results, improvements in almost all the main keywords of rankings for Google.co.uk and an increase of 130% more traffic coming from Google with respect to the previous year. It is hard to say which of all these changes had a more significant impact but in our opinion submitting to Google Maps is a must in order to improve local search and geolocalisation issues and the impact of local links can’t be overlooked either.

Any additional ideas you could add in order to fix geolocalisation issues in your local search engines results?

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras