Link Building Abroad

If you’ve done an SEO program for your website, you discovered the importance of link building. Link building is also an essential part of establishing your SEO program for your international sites. If you’ve only just begun thinking about an international presence, make sure to include link building as part of your overall plan.

Here are some reminders of what to think about when beginning your international link building campaign.

• Local Directories Submit your website to directories based in other countries and that target those local audiences. Look for something like the Nationwide Business Directory in Australia or Allesklar in Germany. Seeing your website listed in local directory searches will increase foreign users’ confidence in the relevancy of your site to their location.

• Local social networking sites It may feel like Facebook and MySpace are global communities, and they are, but there are also sites abroad that are targeted to or used by specific regional audiences. There are a lot of Germans on Facebook, but there are many more on StudiVZ and MeinVZ. Mixi is big in Japan, and Bebo has taken over the UK market. Hop onto the social marketing sites in your international markets and see what people are using. If you can, sign up for accounts there and use those to reach your audience.

• Local Blogs and Websites Again, this may feel like an obvious point, but don’t forget its importance to increasing your international audience. If all your links for your Spanish site are coming from websites in the US, Spanish search engines may not feel that your site is very relevant to Spain. And if the Spanish visitors to your site go through all your US-based incoming links, they won’t see the value of your site to them or may not even be able to understand what’s on those other sites. Instead, you want your Japanese water fountain site to have inlinks from sites like Japanese home decorating blogs and relevant Japanese associations. The easiest way to go about getting links from local blogs and websites? Find those who are writing, researching, or working with your products and services in your foreign regions and languages. Get in touch with those sites and network!

When trying to do some international link building, put yourself in the shoes of your international customers and visitors. Look for the websites that cater to those specific audiences. Google and many other American-based websites may feel like they’re the center of the internet, but that’s not always the case. There’s nothing against using a few well chosen links from home on your international site, but your site’s international value will really increase if you get international links that will attract the attention of your international audience. You want to make sure to establish a presence abroad that will show your customers the relevancy and value of your site to them, just as you would for your website at home.

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