International SEO help

Is there anything in particular that I should keep in mind when optimizing a site internationally? Do search engines have totally separate listings for international companies, or is it just the same listings translated into another language? Any help would be much appreciated.

The first (and most important) thing I would look at is how the majority of your customers/visitors will be getting to you. For example, if it is through Yahoo.co.uk, Google.co.uk, etc then you should make sure your site not only has the same domain ending, you should make sure it is hosted in the same country.

Once that is in place, you will want to optimize like is suggested throughout this forum. You may want to add qualifiers like UK or England to your anchor text when getting IBL's but this depends a lot on the industry. You have to do the research to find this out. i.e. Do a majority of people look for "Widgets in England" or in your industry do they tend to just search for "Widgets".

In the example given above, you could still rank #1 for "Widgets" in the .com equivalent but after you do your research you may find you want to have #1 in the .co.uk

(Substitute your countrys suffix for the .co.uk in this example)