Below is live coverage of the Launching a Global Website from the SES San Jose 2009 conference.
This coverage is provided by Gaurav Sharma of Think Mantra.
We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. You can interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.
| Launching a Global Website | (08/11/2009) |
| 4:33 | Gaurav Sharma: The session started |
| 4:34 | Gaurav Sharma: Geo Targetting for Google - set it in Google Webmaster Tools. |
| 4:35 | Gaurav Sharma: This only helps with Google and not other search engines. |
| 4:36 | Gaurav Sharma: In China online market is huge, but most people convert offline. Targetting for them will be different. |
| 4:36 | Gaurav Sharma: Seasonal behaviors will will be different based on vacations, festivals, fiscal year. |
| 4:37 | Gaurav Sharma: Purchasing options will vary - For example Credi cards may not be the ideal payment method for Japanese customers. |
| 4:37 | Gaurav Sharma: Content regulations marked by Governments also matter. |
| 4:38 | Gaurav Sharma: Don't just translate your content, but localize it. "football" means different things in USA and UK. |
| 4:39 |  |
| 4:39 | Gaurav Sharma: Keyword research is very important for localization for international markets. |
| 4:40 | Gaurav Sharma: There are 4 different ways to write "America" in japanese, based on translation. |
| 4:42 | Gaurav Sharma: Organizational Challenges - Central budget vs. local budget, manpower in local teams, cross border management, US centric business strategy, local team's SEO efforts. |
| 4:43 | Gaurav Sharma: To solve these challenges - Remove duplicate efforts, provide SEO training for local teams. |
| 4:43 | Gaurav Sharma: Up next is Jay Middleton from Adobe. |
| 4:45 | Gaurav Sharma: Adobe is a large global scale, paid and seo managed by a centralized internal team (just 2 people), outsourced agency model, centralized web team - No CMS, Integrated marketing programs, search touches many groups at Adobe. |
| 4:46 | Gaurav Sharma: Adobe getting a CMS next year. |
| 4:48 | Gaurav Sharma: Adobe had to do a global audit on all their properties 80+ countries. |
| 4:48 | Gaurav Sharma: They only had 3 major templates, it took 3 months to get changes implemented. |
| 4:49 |  |
| 4:49 | Gaurav Sharma: First of all they had to make the case, it was not that difficult, but the resources have been cut back in last 2 years or so. |
| 4:50 | Gaurav Sharma: Adobe setup 30 sitemaps (one for each country). Some of the sites were regional like APAC, which are not really country specific. They optimized Google snippet to reflect that correctly. |
| 4:51 | Gaurav Sharma: Keyword Research - Don't force US keywords on the local offices. They pulled natural search data and internal search data. |
| 4:52 | Gaurav Sharma: Employees in the field didn't have any way to communicate what worked with counterparts in other countries. They fixed the communication. |
| 4:53 | Gaurav Sharma: Adobe put a Search Council and included the global representatives and enforced search best practices in web workflow. |
| 4:54 | Gaurav Sharma: Tips for Global success - Keep an open mind and always be encouraging search integration, listen to the employees in the field, optimize templates and the main thing is constant training & best practices reinforcement. |
| 4:54 | Gaurav Sharma: Web people at Adobe are enthusiastice about SEO. |
| 4:55 | Gaurav Sharma: Up next is Todd Watson from IBM. |
| 4:56 | Gaurav Sharma: His last SES was Nov. 2001 |
| 4:57 | Gaurav Sharma: IBM's shift to Marketing 2.0 |
| 4:57 |  |
| 4:58 | Gaurav Sharma: Reach and Attract
Engage and Nurture
Convert to Leads |
| 5:00 | Gaurav Sharma: Global SEO for IBM software online catalog. In 2003 they didn't have as many people to work for SEO. They created a custom CMS to handle that and distributed it globally within IBM. |
| 5:00 | Gaurav Sharma: The CMS is used in 235 countries, 23 languages with 33 countries offering product ordering online. |
| 5:01 | Gaurav Sharma: They worked with their Geo teams to determine current rankings in local search engines and geo-specific campaigns. They taught the geo teams to "fish". |
| 5:02 | Gaurav Sharma: They built a lot of flexibility in their templates - titles, headings, spiderable text. |
| 5:02 | Gaurav Sharma: Reduced redirects and simplifying URL structures to increase performance of pages as well as crawlability. |
| 5:03 | Gaurav Sharma: It took long time to get these changes made within the company. |
| 5:04 | Gaurav Sharma: They worked with local german team, applied basic SEO methodology. They were on page 11, at the end of the project they got to result # 5 for the keyword. |
| 5:05 | Gaurav Sharma: Think Global, Act Local |
| 5:05 | Gaurav Sharma: They use directories for country sub-sites instead of local domains. |
| 5:06 | Gaurav Sharma: Defacto US referrals from geo-sites can negatively your local marketing efforts. |
| 5:07 | Gaurav Sharma: People notice when putting USA top of the list of countries in a drop down. |
| 5:07 | Gaurav Sharma: 80/20 rule - Focus on Local Engine Vs. Google. |
| 5:08 | Gaurav Sharma: People in some countries want the technical content in English, they think it is authority! |
| 5:09 | Gaurav Sharma: Build a culture of search - set expectations right with your teams. |
| 5:09 | Gaurav Sharma: Develop your own local awareness among the teams. Trust those local teams. |
| 5:10 | Gaurav Sharma: IBM Team from Turkey did a great job with their SEO. |
| 5:10 | Gaurav Sharma: Maura Ginty from Autodesk is up next. |
| 5:11 | Gaurav Sharma: Local search engine opportunities are clear. |
| 5:12 | Gaurav Sharma: User behavior on search engines is very different on local search engines. |
| 5:14 | Gaurav Sharma: 85% of results achieved first page rank for at least 1 of 3 search engines in Japan. |
| 5:15 | Gaurav Sharma: They linked paid and organic campaigns and increased 65% increase in organic traffic and decreased budget. |
| 5:16 | Gaurav Sharma: Autodesk worked on a shoestring 6 months ago with their global SEO efforts. |
| 5:17 | Gaurav Sharma: Look ahead - multi year SEO strategy. |
| 5:17 | Gaurav Sharma: Baidu users interact with it differently than Google. |
| 5:17 |  |
| 5:17 | Gaurav Sharma: Q&A started |
| 5:19 | Gaurav Sharma: What tools should be used for global keyword research? Use google web analytics or google's other tools if avaialble for that country. |
| 5:23 | Gaurav Sharma: How does small business reach global market with limited budget? Get the low hanging fruit first and then expand. |
| 5:25 | Gaurav Sharma: Biggest issue for large corportations is to explain localization to different marketing teams and other key stakeholders? Show the numbers how local users are getting to local websites vs. the global/US website. |
| 5:27 | Gaurav Sharma: Use paid search to obtain data to show how localization can help. |
| 5:30 | Gaurav Sharma: The session has ended. |
| 5:30 | 
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