In the the manner I follow I’m now blogging again from the next conference I’m attending. Today I’m attending a4uexpo which should be very informative. As in the past I’m going to upload some photos of the session I’m attending.

First session @DaveNaylor – The Three Pillars of SEO – An Advanced Review

Second session of the day: Negative SEO: Online Nightmares Come True

Presented by @DaveNaylor @SEOIdiot Marcus Tander & Ralph Tegtmeier

Third session: SEO Ranking factors
Presented by: @DaveNaylor @Dixon_Jones @WillCritchlow

Fourth session: Mobile SEO & App Strategy
Presented by Gary Beal

Fith session of the day – The Link Whisperer

Presented by @fantomaster

So let me give you a bit of background behind the whole idea, I’m very technically minded and because of this I always want to know proven steps or facts behind things. I have been involved in search marketing for the last 5 years and in that time I have never been able to find research, which shows how certain SEO factors are influencing on rankings.

While there are several sources such as SEOMoz, SEOBook and thousands of other blogs, I have never found a resources that has setup lab conditions to test SEO ranking factors. So what I would like to do is setup a test environment in which I can set out to test each factor on it’s own.

The methodology that I thought of following was the classical A/B split testing that is used frequently in the on-line marketing environment. I would adapt this methodology slightly as I won’t be using a baseline to compare to but comparing two websites to each other where the factor has been implemented differently.

Now to setup a lab for testing – this is where the tricky part comes into play. I thought of using two different newly registered domains that are hosted on the same servers with all the factors kept as similar as possible except for the one I would be testing.

Now one of the first Ranking Factors that I would like to test out is the difference between having an .html extension and having no extension. So to do this I’m going to do some research using the Adwords keyword tool to find an industry that isn’t too competitive and setup a list of 3 keywords to optimize the site for. These website will both have domain names that have nothing to do with the industry to exclude this as a ranking factors.

As far as content and copy is concerned I will use the same amount of pages with content that share similar SEO factors such as length, keyword density etc. I will be using the SEO ranking factors as set out by SEOMoz’s Ranking Factors and try to ensure that none of these impact on the specific factor that I’m currently testing.

So after the initial test I would like to test factors as listed below

1. .com domain name against country specific such as .co.uk
2. Keyword density
3. Keywords used in internal link structure
4. Using subdomains compared to directories
5. Text bolding and none bolding of keywords
6. Dynamic vs Static urls
7. Click through rate of results on search engine result pages

This list will can be updated in the future but for now this is what I though of starting off with.

Now the next question is how will I judge the results? In the SEO industry it is common practice to look at the traffic generate determine the success of an SEO campaign. This is however not what I’m going to use. We want to determine if a certain factor has improved the rankings of a website. For this reason the ranking of each site on several major search engines will be the aspects that will be looked at.

Thus rankings will be monitored through out a period of 2 months. Now I know this is a shorter period of time than SEO’s would usually advise their clients to wait for results but because we are only testing single factors, I feel this should be sufficient time. If you however you disagree with anything, please leave a comment below as I would like to improve this research wherever I can.

Now as I mentioned before please leave comments to help me to improve this research. I would love to hear from anybody, which can help me improve this. Unfortunately I can’t release any specific info about the domain, industry or content as readers could scew the results. I will however release them when the research is concluded.

Please also share this with your friends and collogues to get more people involved. I really believe in the saying – two minds are better than one and would love as much input as possible.

Well now I need to get cracking the first test scenario so let me know what your thoughts are. Have an awesome day!

Providing your website to visitor in their local language can be greatly beneficial to your company. Foreign language visitors will be able to connect far better with your company and product/s that you offer if they experience it in their native tongue. This connection will increase the chances of your visitors taking action that you intent for them to take while visiting your website.

So should we all go out and translate our websites to target visitors that speak language other than the language our website is offered in? Well if you have the local knowledge this could open up a market that you have largely been missing out on in the past. Is it as easy as translating your website into a foreign language?

The short answer is no and here is why.

When you start targeting different people you also target different cultures. What does this mean for you SEO campaigns? Well people differ quite considerably and this means that so should your SEO campaigns. People in different parts of the world could have different behavioral patterns then what you might be used to, which means your current campaign might not be affective in targeting them.

For instance the Spanish have a custom to have a “siesta” in the afternoon after they have ate lunch. What does this mean if I want to target the Spanish? Well everything, this difference in their behavior cause differences in the way the Spanish use search engines.

Not just this but targeting languages can be trickier than simply translating it into one as this languages could also differs from the Country to Country. For instance Dutch spoken in the Netherlands differs from the one in Belgium, as does French spoken in France and French in some African countries.

You will need to translate your website into the dialect that suites the countries you will be targeting. But simply translating directly from English might not cut it either as products might be referred to in a completely differently manner. This will have an impact on your content copy writing as well as your keyword targeting. These can not simply be translate and used as they might not target the way people search for you product and/or services. You will need to go through a new keyword discovery process to find keywords that are specific to the language and dialect.

Possible problems with having translate versions of your website might be issue such as duplicate content cause by this. According to Google this should not be a problem as content create in different languages are not considered by Google as duplicate content. Have a look here for more info on this topic – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html

So how should you structure your website to incorporate these new languages? Well the general practice that seems to be followed is to have your visitors land on a splash page where they get to choose the language they prefer. Now in my opinion this could potentially create barriers for search engine spiders. The approach that I use consists of two different techniques.

For website targeting multiple locations where English is not the main business language, I would follow these steps. Firstly track the country your visitors are entering the website from and then reroute them to the page that containing the official and most used language of that country. Further more provide the user with a fixed location on the website where they can choose a different language.

For website simply wanting to connect to customers speaking language different from English in a country where this is the main business language. I would have them land on the English version by default but as above allow them to change the language to their native tongue.

In conclusion targeting multilingual users will need a vast amount of planning and resources to implement a solution that will reach the goals set out for the campaign before hand.