Expanding our web presence in Europe

Hello

Please can you kindly let me know if you can help us on the following matter?


We are looking at expanding our web presence in Europe and are unsure
about how best to do this. I will use Germany as the example for these
questions; this is a Country we would like to build our brand.


1.Do we need to obtain a country specific domain for each country we would like to sell into.i.e. if we would like to attract German buyers do we need a .DE domain?

2.To be visible on Google searches on Google.de would it be best practice to host our site in a data centre in Germany?

3.For maximum visibility do we need to have mirrored version of our site or can we use one site that is multi lingual and multi currency?

4.If we can do this from one site the .DE domain would need to point to our .COM site which would mean Google would only see the .COM and therefore I presume our visibility would be poor on google.de?

5.Is it possible to have a number of mirrored sites hosted on different web servers that all see one database that is held on a separate web server and therefore ensure synchronicity across the sites?


Sorry to bombard you with so many questions, I hope you can help!?


Best regards,

Mark


PS we are lookig to hire/employ an asp .net c sharp coder with ecommerce experience, we also have a post for a fulltime web marketing manager.Email markatwooloversdotcodotuk for further info.

If you are starting a new site for each location then a domain for the specific region would be best.



Yes the hosting is a fairly important factor for Geotargetting



You need to be careful here. IF you copy the content on new sites in the same language each new site will never rank well as it will suffer from a duplicate content penalty.
Having the prigional content in the regional language would be fine although diversifying the content would be best.



This tactic depends a lot on strategy.
Just pointing the DNS to the origional site will cause you some issues. You need to make sure that your server returns a 301 responde code ofr a permanent redirect but this will undo much of the regional domains relevance.
If you are buying regional domains you should host them on seperate sites.



Yes. I am assuming you mean a database that brings in content and product data, such as a MySql database? Thats perfectly fine. Anything that happens server side is not seen by the search engines.
You can have one seperately hosted database server if you wish, it doesn't have to be linked to any hosting platform or site specifically.


Depending on your Goals, budget and strategy I would probably look at expanding your existing site to cover multiple regions and languages as you will leverage the power of your exisitng domain and as such, you will not be starting from square one.

Things that help with Geo-targetting are location based data such as country and regional dialing code as well as physical address apearing on the pages.
Getting links from the region being targetted is another good thing to do.

Hi

Thanks a lot for the advice, really good of you to answer all these points..

Have you done this kind of brand internationalisation work, and are you a freelancer looking for work?

In your last point are you saying it would more prudent to start by adding a translation to the current woolovers.com site which would give it visibility on google.de? As opposed to creating a mirrored site with a .de domain and hosted in Germany?

My concern was that just adding a translation feature on the current site would not mean Google gives us the ranking and visibility we would need on google.de.

I can see google have a webmaster help page for developers, would it be likely they would answer this question?

We have a considerable UK PPC spend with google so if we tied the question in with setting up a German ppc account they may be more helpful!?

Regards

Mark