For some businesses, it may be necessary to have a global online presence, meaning they want their website being found on search engines around the globe. Even for small businesses in the United States, the necessity to reach Mexican, Canadian, or British audiences is a necessity. With different languages, cultures, and even technological barriers to overcome, this can be a pretty daunting tasks. Here are a few tips, taken from SearchEngineLand's very helpful guide, on how to better optimize your SEO campaign to reach global audiences. 1. It's not All about Just Translation -Localization, the process of turning your website or product accessible to a certain country/language, stems deeper than simply changing the language. While there are many automated systems out there (ex. Google Translate), the results are usually very poor and can hurt your marketing strategy. Straight translation can often cause confusing content in other languages, not to mention the variety of different cultural influences that go into languages. Spanish websites directed towards south americans may have completely different meanings, sayings, and even grammar, versus those directed towards the Spain. 2. Social Media still Works Overseas - Don't just restrict your social media usage to your main country, Europeans and Asians have been shown to be very interactive when it comes to social media. In addition, by interacting with consumers in different countries, you're engaging in highly valuable market research. The feedback your social media team can get out of these interactions can allows you to customize each localized campaign in order to improve your business globally. 3. Use TLDs - Buying up specific TLDs for your country, like .co.uk, .es, and .fr allows you to better protect your brand and presence in that country. As soon as you break into a different market and gain some sort of traction, you can be almost guaranteed that someone else will buy your domain name and use it to their advantage. Buy them before they can. If you plan to use the domains separately and hosted individually on servers, make sure to assign geo-targetting via Google webmaster tools in order to tell Google where the site is intended to be seen in the google 'universe'. 4. Research Website Layouts for Each Culture - Make sure to research the browsing tendencies of each country before designing landing pages and websites for them. For example, it's been shown that the Japanese market actually enjoys reading more information before engaging in a service or website. This is in contrast to American browsing habits, where bullet points, headlines and small paragraphs are shown to convert better. 5. Use Specific Country Folder and Redirect Accordingly - It may be too expensive for some businesses to have multiple domains and websites hosted across multiple servers around the world, so a good option to fix duplicate content and multiple localized sites is to create sub-folders on your domain for each country (ex. /uk, /espana) and have your localized TLDs remap to those sub-folders. Within the domain, you may be able to use canonical tags for any duplicate content you're using across same language countries. It will also allow you to share the appropriate link juice across your domain and country sites, helping you rank better.  

Inbound Marketing, a term that I believe was coined by Hubspot.com, refers to a type of marketing that involves customers coming to you. This is completely opposite to traditional marketing, also known as Outbound Marketing, that works by sending out a message to people in order to lure them to your product. Inbound Marketing mostly takes place in Search Engine Marketing, since people are usually already searching for a product like yours, therefore they're coming to you rather than being lured by you. Since inbound marketing is a relatively new concept, it's not applied as much as it probably should be. However, there are clear advantage to this new 'hot' marketing technique, and I've listed a few here: 1) You get warm-to-hot leads coming to your website. Unlike traditional marketing, which could range from advertising on a niche website, to radio-tv spots and billboard/print advertising, search marketing allows you to place yourself in front of people looking for your service. This is something that traditional marketing simply can't offer, there is no TV channel, or magazine that can be specifically tailored for your exact product. While the traffic numbers might be lower in search marketing, they're definitely higher converting than any other traditional marketing channel out there. 2) You're engaging in non-destruptive marketing. Most studies today show that companies are dealing with a lot of backlash from advertising campaigns since the average person is 'tuning off' from any sort of promotions and advertising. It's not really hard to blame anyone, considering the average person gets bombarded hundreds of times a day with advertisements from different brands, products and services. Inbound Marketing, since it's directed as people already looking for a particular service or product, is considered more 'natural', since the user is looking for services voluntarily. Why risk having someone angry at your product every time they're 'punished' on Pandora or Hulu because they're trying to watch their favorite shows/songs? 3) Inbound marketing provides a much better return-on-investment in the long run. Paying for direct advertisements usually means spending X amount of money for each time you promote your service and product. Each time you spend that money, your ROI is determined by how effective that particular campaign was. Once you stop spending money, the exposure and sales stop. The only way to make more sales or reach more customers is by spending more money. Search marketing works differently. Since the majority of costs in a search marketing campaign is in increasing your rankings in search engines, the longer you optimize the more business you're likely to achieve. Once you reach the top rankings for your preferred keywords, and traffic begins to come to your business website, your sales will likely increase. By investing enough time and resources into an ongoing inbound marketing campaign, you set your business up to a position where you have lots of people finding you online, interacting with you and purchasing your product. Since search engine marketing fees aren't on a 'per-visitor' or 'per-impression' basis, your sales are not directly correlated to the amount of money you invest. Overall, inbound marketing is the really the way to go for small to medium businesses looking to compete in large markets. Search Marketing allows these smaller businesses to compete against bigger corporations, without having to spend millions of dollars on traditional marketing techniques. By mixing a good search marketing campaign with a strong social media presence, you can increase your sales, build your brand, and create loyal customers without spending an outrageous amount of money in the long run.

Flash Websites (http://www.macromedia.com) were (and still are) a popular choice for website developers due to their ability to provide cool-looking and flashy (hah!) web sites. A flash website can be as interactive as you'd like, allowing you to add animated menus, clever interfaces and videos throughout your site. However, over the past few years, the use of flash has decreased due to several problems related to performance, difficulty to maintain and update, and Search Engine Optimization issues. Flash has been around for quite some time, and while it has been implemented by several applications, small and large, its support has dwindled a bit over the years. Flash is harder to work with than general HTML and CSS web authoring, and it also requires users to download plugins to use and use up more memory when navigating the site. As a result, users with slower, less updated computers may have trouble using website in Flash. As a result, media giants such as Apple, have dropped their support for Flash and gone with newer, faster programming languages such as HTML5. As a result, Flash websites are not supported or visible on mobile products such as iPads, iPhones and older mobile devices. Flash websites are different from traditional websites in that Flash is like one big animation file that runs on your web server. It 'reacts' to certain actions done by users and animates accordingly. Therefore, in order to modify any content on a traditional flash website, a developer needs to open up the animation file, and re-arrange/compile the information in order to add new content. This makes it harder for non-developers to add content, which can be a huge program for SEO. Traditional websites based on a Content Management System such as Drupal or Wordpress make adding content as easy as possible. One of the most concerning problems associated with Flash is the fact that search engine spiders have a really hard time navigating the sites. This should be a huge warning sign for anyone wanting to rank high in Google. Since Flash is one big animation file (rather than a collection of web-pages linked together in HTML) Google only sees one big file. While Google's current algorithm let it 'peek' into a flash website and determine what it's about, it will likely miss a lot of the context of your website and therefore not rank your individual pages accordingly. For example, Google will likely not know that you have a 'services' page on your website, and an 'about' page, all it sees is one big animation file on your homepage. If Google doesn't see new content, and can't read what the content is about, your site will never rank. Flash is a great tool for interactive websites that require no rankings and is ok with some older computers and mobile products (iPhones, iPads, iPods and older smart phones) not being able to access it. However, for those wanting to get online exposure, which is 99% of businesses out there, it would be best to stick to a traditional HTML/CSS website or look into HTML5 development.