At the end of May Microsoft announced its new search engine, Bing. Microsoft justified many of Bing’s new features by noting that 50% of search queries are either abandoned or refined – users aren’t getting the right answer on the first try, citing studies by Jakob Nielsen, Enquiro and internal testing. Microsoft also said that searchers are becoming more focused more on tasks and decisions – consequently search engine sessions are becoming longer as users work their way through their decision making process.

As data from Bing’s first full month becomes available, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at what the Bing rollout means for search marketers and, in a separate article, current search engine market shares.

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A common issue facing companies and organizations with an international presence is how to deploy multilingual sites across one or more Internet domain(s). In other words, should one put all the sites on a .com or .org domain, perhaps taking advantage of directories on the web server to separate each language? Is this the best solution for existing and potential customers? Will there be problems with search engine indexing and visibility?

After having tackled the issue in various SEO projects, I decided to share some of the issues that should be considered when choosing the right path for your company or organization.

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Companies targeting multiple linguistic markets on the web have a lot to think about when planning their Internet strategy and execution. Ideally, search engine optimization should be part of their strategy considerations. In this article, we look at a technical marketing issue of website localization: how should a company distribute content targeted at different markets on the web? Do search engines, such as Google, care if a company uses a separate domain for every country, separate folders on a generic top level domain (TLD), such as a .com, or perhaps subdomains? Do users care?

Four common ways to organize website language variants

Perhaps the best way to understand the range of possible solutions is to look at some examples.

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At yesterday’s ZenaCamp in Genova, I gave a presentation on the main issues that are frequently encountered when creating sites for an international audience:

• Language
• Accented Characters and Symbols
• Language Variants
• Culture

A particular focus was made on user issues, such as providing a page in the right language to a site visitor while allowing them to override the choice – and remembering their choice upon successive site visits.

Search engine optimization was also discussed as there are several techniques which can be used to help search engines correctly identify a web page’s language.

If you’d like a copy of the presentation, please contact me.

Gianfranco Chicco captured several happy campers right after lunch!

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One issue many international Webmasters face is how to properly manage documents written in languages containing accented and other special, non-English, characters. Does it matter how the special characters are written? Do HTML documents need to contain both accented and non-accented words to be found in search engines?

Continuing our series on website internationalization for search engine visibility, we’ll take a look at how special characters can be specified in a document and how these characters are managed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask and Microsoft’s MSN.

In the early days of computing, engineers mapped each of the letters of the latin alphabet used by the English language to a specific numeric code. This mapping became known as the ASCII character set. Unfortunately, no provision was made for accented and other special characters found in the many languages which share the roman alphabet.

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So you just wrote a stunning essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses – in Irish Gaelic. Will Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and Ask recognize it as Gaelic, hosted as it is on your co.uk domain? Maybe. But you can given them a hint!

The trick is to use all of the HTTP and HTML language code settings available to your advantage to ensure your documents aren’t falsely identified. This article considers HTTP and HTML aspects of website internationalization for search engine optimization.

Why is Language Recognition a Problem?

Search engines try to match a web searcher’s language (based on ip geo location recognition or user specified preferences) to web documents when determining the best matches for a search query. In some cases, a user may specify that results be limited to a specific language. Left to their own devices, search engines have a few clues to determine the human language of a document:

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Search Engines and Site Localization

While there are few differences between the UK and US English dialects which might lead to miscomprehension, Noah Webster‘s spelling reform does lead to interesting issues which need to be considered when designing sites for international audiences.

Update: This document was written in 2006 and no longer represents the current state of search affairs. It has been left here as a historical reference. Search engines continually refine their algorithms and that is reflected in how they currently handle regional linguistic differences.

Is it “my favorite color” or “my favourite colour”?

While it may seem like an arcane academic question, how you spell your English language content can determine your site’s visibility in search engines and how your site is perceived by your visitors.

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