One problem that many global companies face for SEO, is localizing their content while leveraging their brand name. All while trying to minimizing the number of sites they have to manage. In order to get found globally, companies need to adopt multi language SEO best practices.

Because Google has become more personalized over the years, it has given users the ability to select the language people can search in regardless of the location. This means that having location specific sites is no longer necessary. This is because users decides whether they search Google in English if they are in Korea or in Korean if they are in the U.S.

The multi language SEO best practices today include the following;

• House all content under one domain and have multiple languages for each piece of content. When a visitor comes to your site, use their IP address to direct them to the part of the site that is in their language. For example you might have digitalfireflymarketing.com/en from U.S., U.K. and digitalfireflymarketing.com/ar for Middle East countires that speak Arabic
• Link all of your language pages to one page and link that to the home page
• Use the same best practices in traditional SEO for multi language. But, optimize each page for the way people search in the market you are targeting. For example someone in Australia may search for a very different keyword combination than someone in the U.S. You need to localize the research so you can localize the page and get it to rank for the audience you are targeting.

One site that does a particularly good job of this is HTC (http://www.htc.com/). If you look on their site you will see a world map in the upper right hand corner. This map is linked to a list of links targeting different locations and languages.

The methodology described above is different from the past. Beforehand, businesses would set up multiple websites going after a specific language to crowd the Google search results. Now, global businesses are left with many different websites under sub domains. Therefore to take advantage of this personalization, website owners need combine location or language specific websites onto one website by migrating them into a system like Drupal like can easily handle multiple languages.

This will give them a number of advantages for SEO.

• Increased content because each web page now may become 5 web pages if they are targeting 5 different languages
• Increased links to the domain. If one locale domain has 30 links and another has 40 links while all content is brought together and the former domains are redirected tot he main site, Google now sees 70 links.

With more content and more links, you improve the chances you will be found in Google. This is because there is more content indexed and more links will allow you to rank higher.