U.S. English

My site is written in 'International English'. I'm reasonably happy with my keyword ranking (no 1 for one keyword, no 13 for a second).

Many of my keywords end in '..ise', '..ised', or '..isation'. An American user would be unlikely to find my site, because they would use the American English spellings of '..ize', '..ized', or '..ization' when searching in Google.

To try and overcome this, I set up a subfolder on my webserver with a copy of my site written in American English. So my American English homepage is at 'www.websitename.com/us/index.html'. However, the keyword ranking for the American English version is almost non-existent. I have a link from the European English homepage to the American English homepage (and back again) to enable the American English version to be indexed by Google.

Apart from the spelling variations, the content is identical in the two versions. Code is html and some css and javascript, nothing complicated.

Any suggestions on how I could improve the ranking of the American English version of my site?

Thanks in advance....

As both sites are almost identical you stand a very good chance that Google will class this as duplicate content, in which case only pages from one, more likely the older pages, will show in the serps. You could even end up harming the pages that are ranking by adding such "almost identical" pages. You could consider rewritting the content in a different way but maintaing the same meaning utilising the Americanized words. It would be much more work but it's the only way I can see it being sure to work. (Maybe cut out some of the big words to make it easier fot the Yanks to understand ;) )

What is a "fot". It must be another one of those "big words" us Yanks have difficulty understanding.

OK, you got me !!