As companies grow, one of the things they start to consider is going international. Understanding how SEO works outside the U.S. can help smooth the transition and save a lot of money. Thankfully if you know how domesitc SEO works then you are probably 90% of the way to getting your site found outside the U.S. To get found by local search engines, the best thing to do is like you did in the U.S., start out with a plan like the one below:

International SEO Tips

• Know your market. While Google owns 65% of the U.S. market, they own a lot more in some other countries and a lot less in others. For example, if you are going into the Chinese market you will need to have your website optimized for Baidu. If you are looking at Russia then you need to consider Yandex.
• Know the language. Like you did in the U.S. you need to know your local language, even U.S. English and U.K. English can have some difference in keywords. If you are going with a non-English site, you will need someone with local knowledge to let you know how people search for your product and what those keywords and phrases are. The best person in this situation is typically the salesperson you are hiring in country.
• Know your website system. Some content management systems like Drupal can support multilingual sites, while others can’t. You need to make sure that stuff published in the U.S. can be pushed to other countries after a translation. You also need to know if you site can do languages that are very different than in the U.S. like Arabic that’s read right to left.
• Location location location. Just like the real estate market, location matters. Search engines will give more preference to a site hosted within a country rather than one outside of a country. Using a content system like Drupal can provide a master website and database in the U.S. hosting that allows a site hosted in Spain to pull information.

Thankfully, the rest of the SEO evaluation is the same. You still need headings (h1 tags) Page Titles, clean URLs and Alt Tags. The only difference is these will need to be filled with language unique to the territory.