How to Capture More Language and Geographically Based Players

Hi All,

I’m packing up for the G2E conference in Vegas (ugh, an 18-hour journey!) and 3 long speaker slots in one day ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

Since I may not be able to post as much as I’d like, I thought I’d add a little gem for you all to chew on.

Although geographical targeting has been around since 2005 on Google, it has become increasingly important to utilise this tool as Google continues to implement algorithm changes to better facilitate non-US and non-English based searches worldwide. Implementing these techniques will absolutely drive more traffic to your site, and even better it will increase your conversions!

I think this just about applies to everyone here as well.

Most gaming sites are targeting more than one geographical country/region and 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 and 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, and 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/ and 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 and 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 and 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 and get a verification code for each and verify site ownership. (this is because Google sees subdomains as a separate website) Once you have done this go into WMC Tools and 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 no 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 and set goetargeting for the respective country. After you have done this, create a sitemap and 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 and 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 AND language based is very soft right now. Implementing these tactics will help you to capture some of this market.

Good Luck!

GaryTheScubaGuy

Edit; I had to add this because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was adding the link to the G2E conference and noticed a redirect so I tested it and lo-and-behold its a stikin 302 redirect on their homepage!!!!! Un-freakin-believable!

For those of you that DON’T know, this is a highly penalised technique because it is one way spammers and bh’s do nasty things. Google knows this so be sure you don’t have any….anywhere! You can check with this redirect checker. If they have an SEO he should be drawn and quartered!