As many of you already know, I am Italian and I am a web marketer.
These two facts made me discover International SEO very soon because -
let's face it - Italy is well-known, but there are not many people in
the world who speak or understand Italian.
If you consider the nature of many Italian companies which rely on
the foreign market for a good portion of their revenues, you can
understand why SEO and International SEO are essentially synonymous for
me and many others European SEOs.
This explains my interest in how search engines treat the problems
associated with multi-country and multi-lingual sites. It also
influences my interest in how a company can come in, attack, and
conquer a foreign market. I've seen both interests becoming quite
common and popular in the SEO industry during these last 12 months.
Many small and medium-sized businesses now have the desire to
engage in a globalized market. Their motivations are obviously fueled
by expanding their business reach, but are also a consequence of the
current economic crisis: if your internal market cannot assure an
increase from your previous business volume, the natural gateway is
trying to conquer new markets.
My Q&A duties as SEOmoz Associate have made me notice the
increased interest in International SEO. Rather than seeing a small
number of questions community members publicly and privately ask us, we
are seeing many questions based on the confusion people still have
about the nature of International SEO and how it really works.
In this post, I will try to answer the two main questions above
referencing a survey I conducted a few months ago, which (even though
it cannot be called definitive) is representative of the common
International SEO practices professionals use.