SEO site with different country/language parts

[woopwoop]

SEO site with different country/language parts
Does anyone have any tips on how to do this?

I'm working on an amazon affiliate site.
The scope is all Amazon countries:
UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Japan

Because amazon don't let you cache the feeds for >24hours, there are limited things I guess that can be done with the Amazon content.

My website structure is domain.com/country (thought this was better than subdomains)

I've got book titles (or so many characters) in the page title
The meta description is also sourced from the title feed on the fly when the page is loaded
I have book reviews next to books (so some are in other languages...) - just don't want it to be identical to Amazon / all the other stores out there

I'm probably going to attach forums and articles, maybe a blog to get more content but the languages will be a problem.

Has anyone ever done a project like this? Any tips?
Does translating blog posts/articles to other languages help? Even if by Babelfish?
I have no idea what to do with the page code itself?
Should I specify somewhere a different encoding or language? Will this help?

I've made the skeleton of the site and the functionality works - now just need to add the flesh in the best way for the SE's

 

[woopwoop]

Anyone? Surely someone must have advice for preparing a website/webpage for different countries/languages? And SEO for it?

 

[woopwoop]

ok - one last bump!

Still the same questions as in the OP, but particularly the html encoding to do with Japanese, French and German.

Does anyone know what to put in the header to allow all characters from these languages to be displayed?

The Japanese I put in the page just breaks the links and is replaced with "?????"

Any help on this and the other stuff appreciated - also if anyone has any tips about storing entries in a database in these languages - I'm keen to hear any tips!

 

[miked]

If I were you I'd just treat this as a standard SEO project. Non-content elements wouldn't change, and the SEO of the content would be treated in the same way also: only difference is it'd have to seem natural for the language(s) in question. This means you'd definitely need fluent speakers of the language(s) in question to write the content, as they'd need to be precise, not just in terms of keyword weighting but also phrases, colloquialisms etc.

To get this content, maybe you could put a notice up in the International Society of your local university? I'm betting you'd find some foreign students willing to translate for you cheaply. The key thing would be to get across the concepts of SEO and why it's important, but once you've done that you should be able to get useful content.

Mike.

 

[woopwoop]

Thanks Mike, I've been thinking along those lines too. About the encoding - do you have any experience of getting japanese or other languages into a webpage and displayng correctly as rollover title text and filenames etc.?

It's driving me a little crazy. My xml feeds are showing the Japanese perfectly but title text and file names are giving me errors?

 

[miked]

No, I'm afraid not. When freelancing I sorted out some Spanish and Mandarin content for a site, but we decided not to add the extra bells and whistles you talk about because the hassle seemed out of proportion to the benefit we'd get. The content was additional to the site rather than the focus, so it wasn't really worth it.

Perhaps you should ask yourself if it's really worth the extra work? if it is, then good luck and I'll keep a look-out.

Mike.

 

[WeTalkBuiness]

Hi woopwoop, I advise you to build a blog which incorporate your amazon ads in your blogs.

Write some relevant articles or videos for the product you are trying to sell. and post it on your blog.

Then promote that via SEO, PPC, facebook, linkedin, etc.