Companies must not overlook SEO issues in Global Expansion

Posted by Rightcopywriter Team

July 4, 2008

There are some important issues pertaining to search space which many companies overlook during their expansion plans overseas.

An expanding company may have an extra advantage of brand and search engine presence locally, but it still needs to do thorough planning for overseas expansion.

The search engines do not accept a cookie when a user clicks on the link to go to a different database. A cookie needs to be set up to bring the user to localized session as soon as he clicks on the link.

A search engine, through following options, can determine the specific country to which a particular page or site should be listed.

1. Providing the domain address- this is essential in case of most countries which verify the address during registration before delivering a local domain.

2. Location of the hosting environment – this enables the search engines to determine the data centre range. Each country is assigned with IP range which is passed down to providers of Internet access and hosting companies

Google’s Webmaster Tools help Webmasters tag their site(s) to a specific country. It is particularly more useful in situations where a Webmaster or company is using sub-domains that may be hosted in more than one country.

While deciding about hosting in one or more countries, one must note that shifting a domain from one IP to another resetting of filters throws the site out of index for some time. This will result in loss in ranking, and hence must be well estimated before taking decision on the change of location.

Search Engine Optimization