 Let's get started on international SEO. So today we're going to be doing some introductions, talking about SEO in 2017, how you can optimize your site for the global market, talking about some Drupal modules to help some common scenarios, and then hopefully we'll have time for Q&A at the end. So just to get started, my name is Jen Slump. I'm a senior digital strategist at Media Current. Before I get into a little bit of background, let me just ask a quick question. So how many of you guys have ever wished that you knew your consumers better and could drive more traffic and ultimately drive more convergence to your site? Yeah, pretty much everyone, right? So I was studying psychology, yeah, exactly. So I was studying psychology in school and immediately became infatuated with consumer behavior. What makes a person choose brand A over brand B? What motivates them to actually make the purchase or what causes them not to? So here I am a couple of years later at Media Current for those who don't know Media Current or a full service agency focused on Drupal websites, and as part of the strategy team, my focus is working with clients to discover the who, what, and why of their business. So personas are at the center of all of our decisions. It's the first thing we dig into and every decision from there on out all are based back on the personas. So we work and do a content audit, audience research obviously is the first thing, SEO, and everything to really an editorial calendar mapping out the plan and marketing automation. All of that comes back to the personas and we take a data-driven approach to increasing the ROI of our clients' websites. My name is Calvin Sharps. I'm with Wingo Tech. We do translation and localization software. And I, from a marketing background, am very interested in SEO and SEM and how it is affected across international and globalized sites. And so I've kind of gotten to be a little bit of a specialist in that term simply because of the job I have and the fact that I'm a marketing person. We have some kind of neat things we'll show you today that you can do in Drupal that will help drive that traffic up and some very interesting kind of facts and figures that we can show you how to make things a little bit easier. So hopefully it will be informative as well as some information that you can take with you to make your stuff a little easier and better to do. All right, so let's get started. SEO in 2017. There's obviously a ton to talk about when it comes to search engine optimization and we've only got 25 minutes today. So we're going to keep it as concrete as possible and give you some key takeaways to walk away and get on the path towards success. So every day on Google there are over 40,000 search queries a second. That's crazy, right? So that translates to 3.5 billion a day or 1.2 trillion a year and that's just on Google alone. And we're living in a digital age, right? So we're connecting with people and businesses around the globe now more than ever. It's becoming more and more difficult to get ahead of the competition and to really find your niche and connect with the consumers that you're interested in. Search engine optimization is a key tactic in order to do that, to tell users who you are and to drive them to your site. Those businesses who are going global, it's even harder. You're not just reaching one country or one language. You need to really tailor your content to multiple languages and countries in order to succeed in all areas. And going global is hard, right? I'm not going to sit here and lie and say after this you're all going to be experts and it's going to be a simple switch. It takes a lot of work, a lot of effort, but the good news is that there's tools to help and we're here hopefully to make things a little bit easier for you. It's sometimes easy to forget that there's other search engines out there other than Google and Bing. Obviously in 2016 these were the top 10 search engines in the U.S. So you can see Google obviously has a huge monopoly on the market. That's clear and that's the case really globally. But it's important to keep in mind that there are others and you need to look at who the top search engines are for your site so you can tailor your content and your SEO strategy accordingly. And this is just in the U.S. So when we go to the global level, there's other big key players and Google's not always going to have the monopoly or be the leader when it comes to search engines in other countries. For example, Yandex is a big one in Russia. We're not going to get into all the details here but just remember do your research, figure out what countries you're targeting, what the top search engines are in that area, and how you can provide clues to them to improve your chances of ranking higher. They're not all created equally. So sure, all search engines are tasked with crawling and indexing your site but how they determine relevancy, that depends on their unique algorithm and there's not a one-size-fits-all. If you do one thing for Google it doesn't mean that you're going to improve your success rate on another search engine. So again, just last time, do your research, know your audience, know the search engines that you're targeting and how you can be most effective on them. So where to begin? The first step is choosing your domain structure. So we'll dig into these in just a minute but the top three primary domain structures to choose from are country code top-level domains, sub-domains, and sub-directories. From there, determining where you're going to host. So if you can, if you have the ability, host locally, that will help you improve your rank because it really shows search engines that you're located in that area. The downside obviously is they're more expensive and it's not always an option. For example, if you're using sub-directories you actually could not host on a local IP address. So now we're going to break these down, some high-level pros and cons of each approach. So the CCTLD, this is the clearest way to tell the search engine where you're located. Search engines do see them as totally separate sites so there's no domain authority that's crossed off to your other websites. So easy way to rank, it improves your chances of ranking higher when it comes to local search. Downside is it's more expensive, there's no cross-domain authority ranking. Next we've got sub-domains. These are a bit easier to maintain but the downside is there's a weaker signal of search engines when it comes to local search and it might dilute the domain authority. Sub-directories are very, very similar to the sub-domains. The big difference here is that you consolidate your domain authority. So I don't like to choose, it really is what works best for your business but if I had to, typically the CCTLD is best for country targeting and the sub-directories are best when it comes to language targeting. Next you've got to tailor your content by the region so speak to your users in a language that they understand not just the actual language you're using on the site but the currency that you use, the any forms that you have, contact information, make it relevant to them and there's also differences when it comes to how people perceive layout, design, color. If you have the ability to work with a local designer, do it, obviously it's expensive but they know what is most impactful for the region that you're targeting and it can really go a long way. Also make yourself more relevant by engaging in local activities so that could be connecting with local search engines, registering on the local search registration sites and engaging in link building activities. This lets users know that you're not just present in their area but you're a trusted member of the community and provide clues to search engines so submit your XML site maps to all the search engines that you're targeting. Use language specific meta tags when you can so HREF link tags and language meta tags are a way to tell Google and Bing respectively what language that version of your site is targeting. If physical location is important to you guys, if you're a restaurant or if you have multiple stores in different locations, geo specific meta tags are something you should be considering for Bing. Again, there's a lot of different variations of this so these are the most popular because it's Google and Bing but go back, make sure you're doing what you need to do for the search engines that are most prevalent. Any developers in the room? All right, well Calvin's here to help you guys. I don't know about that. So Drupal, I'm gonna talk to you a bit about Drupal 7 versus Drupal 8 and a little bit of the differences and especially when it comes to translation and localization, in Drupal 7 was localization and multilingual was kind of an afterthought. When it was originally created, there were some hooks into it but to make the site truly multilingual or global you had to add all of these other modules in to make it work. So you have stuff like entity translation, variables, IATN, et cetera. You didn't need all of these but depending on how your site was set up you would have to have certain of these options. Now Drupal 7 actually is a good multilingual choice in the fact that it does have support even with these and this community has been really good around that. So if you're still on Drupal 7, you don't have to fret, those are still a good option for you to be there. Drupal 8, they decided to make all of those translation modules be part of the core. I'm sure everyone has seen and been familiar with this slide. This comes from Gabor and his team but they really wanted to start the language as kind of the base of the whole software CMS. And so in 7, the concept is as you start with an English site and then you add additional sites. In Drupal 8, the first thing you do is you pick your language and so you can actually have a base in a different language. It's not the assumption that English is that. So it is important to kind of keep those in mind when you're doing the development because you're gonna have to think of these things just a little bit different on each approach. So for multilingual, you can do both. They both work pretty well. I think Drupal 8's probably a little bit stronger but Drupal 7, don't fret, it's still a viable option. So in terms of SEO and how do you do that with multilingual, here are some of the modules that we would recommend that you would install to help with that. The first one is a meta tag, path auto, an XML and I'll go through these in a little bit more detail, analytics and some sort of a translation engine. It could be us or there's some other competitors that do it as well too. But what does meta tag do? So if you look at a page and you see the display layer of it, there's a ton of code behind that. There's all these hidden fields and there are meta descriptions. There's a page title, there's a bunch of different things. There's glossary terms, there's an abstract, you kind of see in some of these things. And there's a module of meta tag that actually helps manage that and put all of those tags on the pages. So that doesn't happen by chance. It has to be programmed into it. And you can use different taxonomies and different terms and you can customize each page and there's a variety of things that you can do to make it a little easier. But you wanna have something like this to actually create this code on the page so when a search engine goes to scan it, it knows what it's looking for. Now Bing and Google all look for a few different things and this module does a great job of producing and helping tag both of those. This one will work for both N7 and N8. And all of these modules actually have ports for both versions. But here's some information kind of around that. The next thing is you wanna have your URL be localized as well too. And so using something like Path Auto is what we would recommend. It takes a thing and it says, instead of saying node one, two, three, you actually have the name of the page and that's typically taken off of a title and you can set up a bunch of different rules and do it from scratch or whatever. But when you go to translate that, you wanna do the same thing as well. You want those paths to be translated simply because the search engine's gonna be picking those up and off that page. So you wanna use page titles and kind of keywords in those terms to help kind of drive your ranking and your traffic up. You also wanna have what's called a simple XML site map. And what this does is if you see the site map.xml and this is really kind of a Google thing, but it actually indexes your entire site. And so what it does is it does some page rankings and it does like priorities when the page was actually updated and a lot of the search engines will actually come in and look at this thing first before it scans your site because it doesn't wanna have to scan say a thousand pages on your site. It only wants to scan the updates and it wants to see how often you update your pages. So page ranking and all of that stuff kind of plays into that. Now this one will also play with each of the languages too. So you wanna have a site map in each language that you're doing. If you're doing a subdomain or a subdirectory, you can have this sit in a file and it'll actually find that in there and so it'll help to have the engine scan those particular files and the changes that you have there. Now Google Analytics, you don't necessarily have to have that, but it's very helpful Google has some webmaster tools that I'd recommend looking at but certainly you wanna be able to see where your traffic is coming from, where it is in the world, what crosslinks are happening. There's no way to kind of track this information unless you're actually doing it. Google favors you if you have analytics on your site that's their site, even if you don't use it have it there because they will look for that it'll help in the ranking parts of that. And then there is a set of Google webmaster tools that tell you all the extra files you have to have and kind of the talks about the sitemap XML and all the made tag data and those other modules will help you put that there but you wanna make sure you're kind of studying what Google's actually asking for to make sure that those things are being kind of implemented. And then we have, and there's a variety of different translation companies that hook into Drupal and what we talk about here is you wanna have the ability to be able to translate all of the elements. So it's not just the node content but all of the fields, all of the different pieces of a page. So if you look at how a page is made there's menus, there's taxonomies, there's blocks, all sorts of stuff and all of those elements have to be translated. So when you go to translate a page you actually can't just translate the node, you have to translate all of the other stuff and you have to translate the made tags and so all of that content has to be stripped out and translated so when it gets put back into the system it will actually be scannable and searchable. So if you're going with a provider make sure that they're able to translate all of these items and elements because if you don't then you're missing out on a lot of opportunity for that to be picked up by the search engines. So a lot of people ask, we kind of just do this in a little bit about human versus machine translation and that kind of stuff, how do you do this? Machine translation in some cases is about 60 to 80% accurate and human translation can be 100% based on subjectivity but you really don't want to use a machine translation for any kind of very valuable content. Now if it's comments or maybe blog posts or some of these other things, maybe that's fine but if you have very important data or very important content on your site it's really smart to have that translated properly because the engines will actually look at that and in some cases they know it's machine translation and they'll actually downgrade your page based on the fact that they know that it's not a human translated site. All right, so now we're gonna get into some common use cases. So first up, what are the common use cases for country and language targeting? So do you have a business that is targeting multiple regions? Do you have visitors from multiple countries or users who speak multiple languages? If the answer is yes to any of these geo-targeting is definitely something you should be considering. So in terms of country targeting if the physical location is important to you and again you're seeing traffic and conversions coming from multiple countries, country targeting is probably the way to go. If the geographic location doesn't have much of an influence and you're seeing traffic and conversions coming from users within the same country but maybe speaking a different language then language targeting is the way for you to go and that means having multiple language versions of the same site. But maybe you're a hybrid so maybe the geographic location does actually matter and you're seeing users and coming from multiple countries and within that country speaking multiple languages. So here's a sample of a URL structure. So you can see it's using a CCTLD and targeting the country. Any guesses on who exactly this URL is trying to target? Exactly, searchers in Spain. So here's two others, one using a subdomain, one using a subdirectory. Any ideas here? Spanish speaking searchers worldwide actually. So you can see that it's a dot com in both cases and it's a subdomain and subdirectory so you're just targeting the language. So here are two others using CCTLD plus a subdomain in one case and a language parameter in another. Guests is here? Yep, I think I heard a fact there. So the Spanish speakers in Spain. So hopefully this helps kind of put together what all the different use cases that we just went through, how you would target the country versus the language or maybe a hybrid of both. Okay, so the way you wanna be able to manage your translation is using some sort of a translation management system. A little biased, that's what I'm showing you mine. But what you wanna do is have the ability to use translation assets and resources. And so there's a variety of things you wanna look at there. You wanna make sure that they have some sort of deep integration into Drupal. There's a lot of different modules. TMT does some integrations and some other sub-companies and we do it and whatnot. But you wanna make sure that you have some sort of an integration because if you have to copy and paste this content out, it's very time-consuming to do that. You're either having to export XML or you're having to copy and paste and repaste it back in. It's just not a very efficient use of time. It's project management intensive or a webmaster or a developer that has to do that. You also wanna have stuff that does what are called glossaries and terminologies. And glossaries and terminologies are pieces of content that are translated a specific way. And so think about buying keywords in a specific location and you're buying those keywords. You wanna make sure that those keywords are being used on your page. So when the translators go to translate the content, that they're actually using the appropriate verbage, so to speak, so that's being picked up in that. You can always say things in different ways in different languages. And so if you're being very targeted or buying specific things, you wanna make sure that you're controlling that at the translator level or whoever's doing the translation. Now you also wanna do translation memories. Now translation memories are previously translated content that you can reuse. Anytime something is translated from say English into Spanish, those are saved as a memory and you can reuse those to translate other content or to re-translate that same content. So it's important in a web environment if you're going to make a change to a single element on the page or a paragraph or say a sentence that you don't have to re-translate the entire page again, that you can send it to a system that will know what those changes are and keep track of those in some sort of a change management fashion. That's super important for speed and also for the cost of stuff. It's also nice to have some machine translation and community and professional translation abilities. You wanna have workflows that are very flexible. So based on different content types and different languages, you might have different workflows and so in one language you might do machine translation and in another language you might do professional translation for a variety of different reasons but you wanna make sure that the system is flexible enough to do those and support those without having to go and change a bunch of stuff. There's also what we call language quality assurance. It's the ability for kind of think of it as a spell check or a glossary kind of thing to check on your grammar and those types of things. It also goes into double checking how our forms are laid out. If you have the right currency, date, time formats, all of those things are important to be presented accurately. Otherwise it's looked down upon on the search engines. So it's nice also to be able to have some status of the translation inside of the system. So based on the source language and the translated targets, being able to keep track of that very easily. And it's also good for you to be able to manage your SEO content. So if you look at the previous slide, these are based on nodes or the node translation where on a config you wanna be able to do config files, menu files, blocks, all those types of things. You wanna make sure that those items are able to be translated easily out of the system as well too. And if you don't have that, you can see how time consuming it could be to actually go into source code and have to copy and paste those main attacks and descriptions into the different languages. And these are the different fields and custom types that we can support in that kind of thing. So all of those on that. All right, so the last common scenario here is dealing with duplicate content when you have multiple dialects. So this obviously can become a huge issue and really hinder your ability to rank an SEO if you're flagged for duplicate content. Search engines really hate that. So here's an example of a site lush. So on the left you're looking at the US version and on the right you're looking at a version for Spain. Any guesses on if there's any risk for duplicate content here? So the answer here is actually no, right? So you can see totally different content, different language, different products, different currency, everything on the site is really targeted for that specific region. So this is the ideal scenario here. Here's another example, Manhattan Associates where you can see slightly different content. You've got the same content here in the hero, same call to action buttons, but a little bit of variance in the navigation and what falls below the fold. So here you are a little bit at risk for duplicate content. So what do you do? You use those language meta tags that we talked about earlier. So adding in the content language, meta tag, oop, up here and all the href lang tags down here for Google. This is telling search engines what other language versions of the site exist. So depending on where the searcher is searching from, the search engine knows which version of the URL to serve up in the search. So often we hear from clients when we're going through this, what about canonicalization? So you actually don't need it in this case when you're using two different sites. So we only recommend using a rel canonical tag if you're dealing with duplicate content within the same domain. So for example, if you had a landing page that you often use in marketing campaigns, so there's different versions of the URL with URL parameters specific to track the success of that campaign. That's an instance where you would want to use a rel canonical tag because you would only want the main URL showing up in the search engine result pages. In the two cases we just went through, this is not necessary. They are different URLs, different targeting, different languages or countries. And so in these cases, you don't need the rel canonical tag. So just to wrap up, I know we ran through a lot of information here. So some key steps for success and things to remember. First, choose a domain structure that works for your business goals, your budget and the resources that you have at hand. Second, tailor the content and make content as unique as possible wherever you can. If you are at risk for duplicate content, add in that language meta tag and other clues to search engines to tell them what other options are available depending on where the user is coming from. Make sure that each version of the site is easily discoverable. So again, through the URL and those meta language meta tags that we talked about and engage in local activities. That's how you tell your users that you're present in the community and you're relevant to them and will help increase the click-through rates and ultimately conversions once they're on your site. So I think we're right at 25 minutes but if anyone has questions, Calvin and I will be in the back for a couple minutes. There's another session starting so we don't wanna hold them up. But definitely available, find us back there or later in the conference or social media, we'll be around. Thank you. Thank you.