Webdesign en SEO nieuws

While writing the article about Changing Hosting and duplicate content - or not? and the mentioned ranking drop by the client i remembered i wanted to write a posting about what happend. Due to time ... well, it took a while but here it is.

About a year ago i got a call from a dutch guy that as he said represented an american businessman that would like to have his website optimized. Nothing strange about that neither the fact that his business was in the adult industry. I get a lot of calls / emails from companies in that section that want to get some advice or want their site build by me. Normaly i reject, i have nothing with that business and i know its a sharktank were every technique is used to rank, no matter what they have to do to get up there.

As it wasn't anything explicit, i got freehand to design and optimize the site and they accepted the fact that i couldnt guarantee top positions because it takes more than just the web site. Further more i didnt have to worry about backlinks, they got that covered and so i agreed.

After a short investigation on the top sites and gettin a bit acquainted with the branche i made a report and discussed it with my client. The site was going to be hosted in the Netherlands, it was a Dutch tld and it was ment for businessmen and tourists. So the main language, in my oppinion, should be dutch and the second one english. As all good SEO know, this is important as Google is narrowing the results more and more to the users location. Even a laptop with english as main language connected to the net through a dutch IP will get more country specific results. By using both languages the dutch as well as the english speaking would be able to use the site.

The web site went live and within a few weeks it did get good positions, some in the top 10 (i still am puzzeled about that) and all was going well as i thought. My work was done, uhm not quite.

My client called me after a few weeks and told me they didnt get any calls or emails and he was convinced the main language of the site and the main pages should be in english. Changing language as i know, will make the site drop and so i tried to convince him not to do that. The answer to the low conversion rates should be found in the backlinks, content, pictures etc. not in changing the main language.

We agreed to let it be in Dutch and i put up a large button that pointed to the english version to direct the english visitors to the propper pages. Appearantly that didnt change the conversion and a week (to short to know) later i got another call, as you can guess it should be changed into english. So i changed it and put it live. I did tell my client one last time that his site would drop and pulled the plug on this project. As i am curious and do check what happens to sites after i have made changes (the only way to learn what realy works out there in the searchengine jungle) i followed the rankings for a couple of weeks and saw them drop as expected.

Having pages up in the rankings in foreign languages can be done, but that takes a lot of work and more

5 Basics in hosting and geolocation

• Use a country specific .tld or use the global .com
• Phisically host the site in that country
• Make sure you have the language tags in place in the head section
• Use the propper language in content, descriptions and everywhere else
• Get backlinks from pages in that country in the propper language

Get your site into gear and do it the right way