Since SEO is constantly changing, how can SEOs determine the most important areas of focus? As Matt Bailey of SiteLogic Marketing tells WebProNews, the foundation has to be strong in order to be built upon.  For this reason, he believes the fundamentals are critical to SEO success.

Content is just one of the fundamental areas of SEO. Not only is the content itself important, but the structure of the content is also important. Bailey says content needs to be scalable, readable, and allow users to understand the content on the rest of the page by simply looking at the headline. This is significant because numerous studies show that the majority of people scan content instead of reading it.

There have been many recent debates pertaining to long content versus short content. People often say they tried blogging, Facebook, or Twitter and found that they didn’t work. However, Bailey believes users need to examine their efforts to see if they are utilizing them correctly.

“The what is going to change daily. The why will never change,” he says.

He goes on to say that if you have a purpose, the “what” doesn’t matter and can always be applied.

Marketers also struggle with the challenge of creating content for both users and search engines. Bailey says the key to this dilemma is in the analytics. For example, it is very possible to have the right ranking with the wrong page. As a result, marketers need to look at their analytics to see which metrics work. He tells WPN that marketers can celebrate when they determine what is profitable, not when they rank high.

Although there will be many more changes for SEO, the job of driving people to a destination will always be constant.

Are you focusing on getting the fundamentals right or are you distracted by the “shiny, new object syndrome”?

Posted by RobOusbey

At a small or medium sized company, you might be part of a very small team with responsibility for SEO, or you may the only person – and it might not even be your full time job.

Sales

Example:

RobTech’s sales funnel typical begins with the visitor filling in an enquiry form on the website, then having an online product demo with a member of the sales team. After the demo, people either buy the software, turn it down because they don’t like it, or turn it down saying that they like it but can’t buy it right now (often because of the cost.)

Conference Speakers

Example:

RobTech’s Product Director speaks at five or six conferences each year. He sees many people finish their presentations with a website URL, and maybe even a link to download the slide deck. Instead, he makes sure that all RobTech’s presentations are made available with extras. A page on their site contains the slide deck, high quality versions of the images used, full data sources for charts and tables shown, and links to each of the other RobTech resources and white-papers mentioned in the presentation.

Public Relations

Example:

Copywriting

Example:

The girl who manages the knowledge base for RobTech (basically a very dry list of error messages and how to resolve them) came up with the idea of ‘The Top Six Moments of Dr Nick Riviera‘, which was simply ten embedded YouTube videos, but got to number one on Reddit, and received a lot of links. The guy who writes technical descriptions for the website wrote a short page about "Ten things you don’t want to hear your dentist say (while he’s peering into your mouth.)" which was well received by bloggers and got a few good links.

Personnel / Human Resources

Example:

RobTech have updated the standard template for their job adverts; alongside the request to email your CV and cover letter to the HR Director, they also say ‘find out more about the company and what’s it’s like to work here on our recruitment page.‘ A fair number of these links are nofollow-ed, but a good number do pass value – and this change came from just a 15 minute conversation with two people who’d never heard of SEO before, so the ROI here was technically awesome.

Procurement

Example:

Designers & Creatives

Example:

After the new website had launched, RobTech’s designer had a few days free. She took some of the rejected designs that weren’t used for the site, had a developer turn then into HTML files, and offered them up as free downloads. The page has received a significant number of links from free CSS template sites; they’ve since added a collection of free vector images which did very well on DesignFloat.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Example:

RobTech gives an annual donation to local dog shelter (the CEO is an archetypal ‘dog person’) – and the shelter now has a badge in their sidebar, thanking the company for their donation. Even more successful has been the ‘technology recycling’ drive the company runs one weekend each year. This year they put up a page on the site about the event, which received links from a variety of local sites, including the mayor’s website.

Summary

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Posted by Danny Dover

 Guess who’s back. Back again. Danny’s back. Tell a friend. (My co-workers hate me ;-p) This week’s Whiteboard Friday is about how to get an SEO job. In it, I divulge the secret of how I suckered my way into how I earned this job. I also do the worst impression of my life and finish with a shocking twist that I guarantee you won’t see coming!

See my stats for this video

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Apply for an Internship

• Leverage Start-ups – Start-ups are particularly well suited for interns because most of them can’t afford to pay people
• Use the "Godfather Approach" – Make the company an offer they can’t refuse. (Try working for free and provide your own laptop in exchange for an internship,)

Dive Right In

• Build Test Sites – After reading the Beginner’s Guide to SEO, try building simple sites to target long tail terms.
• Offer to Help Charities – Like start-ups, charities tend to not have a lot of extra resources. Take advantage of this by volunteering.

Create a New Niche

• Leverage What You Already Know – Combine your current knowledge with what you want to learn to become the best in a given niche.
• Educate Others For Free – Earn links and share the love by teaching others about what you learn.

Join the Community

• Participate in Blogs/Social Media/Conferences – Get your name out and build your network by participating online.
• Take Advantage of Osmosis – Get into an environment where you learn simply by being in the right place.

Follow me on Twitter, Fool!
or
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter (who is slightly less blunt)

If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my SEOmoz profile under Danny. Thanks!

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Posted by richardbaxterseo

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A simple example expanding a list of options for a user searching for flights:

Improving your navigation can have a positive impact on your site architecture. By making sure these fundamentals are covered, you can build your marketing efforts on a solid foundation knowing your website is crawlable and super-friendly to search engines. What are your favorite examples of great navigation?

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Posted by randfish

Another great post from Jason Cohen popped onto my radar yesterday entitled "Startup Competitive Advantages that Work." It’s definitely worth a read, even if you’re not at a startup.

As a passionate (OK, maybe obsessed is the right word) startup guy and someone who loves SEO, I couldn’t help but want to jump into the fray with some thoughts on how the field we’re in – domination of the organic search results – can be an unfair, competitive advantage for businesses that know how to wield it.

The core of Jason’s post is below:

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Last week I detailed the most common misconceptions about competitive advantages, so go read that if you haven’t already.

To summarize: Anything that can be copied will be copied, including features, marketing copy, and pricing. Anything you read on popular blogs is also read by everyone else. You don’t have an "edge" just because you’re passionate, hard-working, or "lean."

The only real competitive advantage is that which cannot be copied and cannot be bought.

Like what?

And he’s got a number of terrific answers, but SEO, and more broadly, phenomenal organic web marketing, isn’t among them. Before I tackle why I think it belongs there, let me explain the difference between "good" SEO and defensible, "competitive advantage" style SEO.

"Good" SEO means

• You have a solid quantity of unique, quality content that users and customers will find useful.
• Your pages and links are crawlable, indexable and generally search friendly.
• You’ve done your homework with keyword research and update it regularly (monthly – quarterly) as new terms/phrases rise/fall in demand.
• You’ve engaged in some decent link acquisition campaigns, garnering links from a few authorities in your industry, some blogs, maybe a few article sites, press releases, link exchanges and the like to the point where you have similar metrics to your competition.
• You’ve engaged in social media and have profiles on the major sites, have a few tweets every week that point to your site and a few hundred fans on Facebook.

In other words, you’ve followed best practices, done the "right" things and while an SEO audit might reveal some missed opportunities and an error here or there, you’d generally come away with an "A" on your SEO report card.

"Competitive Advantage" SEO means

• Your site produces content people love to visit and love to share in a scalable, hard-to-replicate way
• Your on-site SEO is "best of breed." Note: This isn’t much different than good SEO – on-page/on-site optimization is unlikely to ever be a competitive advantage.
• Your keyword research is baked into the content generation process. The material your site produces fulfills keyword demand just as, or even before it exists by tapping into the subconscious of the web and the culture of ideas/questions in your industry/niche.
• Website owners and content creators have a powerful psychological incentive to link to your work frequently, just as those who participate/contribute to the social web are incented to share via their network of choice.

Some Examples of "Competitive Advantage" SEO Sites:

• StackOverflow
• Yelp
• Wikipedia
• LinkedIn
• Mashable
• Last.fm
• NY Magazine
• Amazon
• Cheezburger Network
• WordPress
• AllRecipes
• SmashingMagazine

All of these have content pouring out of them, generated rapidly, scalable, and in time with query demand. They have broad networks of patrons and participants that incent the spreading and sharing of their content through links and social networks. They employ content+SEO+sharing in a high-return equation that’s nearly impossible for competitors to match. I’ll illustrate:

That’s not to say they can’t be beaten, but runner B (a new competitor) is going to have to go dramatically faster than runner A (the market leader) if they want to catch up before runner A sees them coming and turns up the jets.

SEO Can Be a Competitive Advantage

This is my argument for why the level of truly great SEO I described above, belongs on the list of unfair competitive advantages.

1. It’s massively hard to duplicate
2. It’s prohibitively expensive to buy (and just buying the link influence signals violates guidelines)
3. It requires tremendous creativity paired with exceptional execution and a time-bounded network effect (all of the sites I mentioned have dramatically increased their lead over time and continue to do so)

It’s certainly not the only option, but it can have a dramatic impact. If you’re starting a company, starting an SEO campaign or just want to renew your vision for how your site will go from ranking for a few keywords to becoming a dominant market player, it’s, at the least, a strategy worthy of consideration.

p.s. If you’re interested in some more practical SEO advice this morning, my slide deck from the Blueglass LA conference – Strategic SEO Link Analysis – may be able to scratch that itch.

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Posted by Danny Dover

 This week’s Whiteboard Friday features the return of Rand (woo hoo!) and his self declared biggest SEO mistakes. We screw up a lot here at SEOmoz (hell, they hired me), so we feel it is only appropriate to take this opportunity to share what we have learned in an effort to prevent you from making similar mistakes. SEO is complicated. The best we can do is practice, work hard and compare notes.

1. Reciprocal Links + Robots.txt NoFollow

Back before the formal SEOmoz days, Rand used to dabble a bit in some grayer areas of SEO. The first mistake he mentions is a tactic involving offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via robots.txt/meta robots so that he could get all of the link value. This tactic didn’t really work and he ended up having to do a lot more work to get in the good graces of the webmasters he had fooled. Head smack!

2. Buying Links for Clients

This tactic also took place before formal SEOmoz days. At the time, Rand spent client budgets on paid links. This is a bad idea because the value of the links can’t be determined (was Google even counting them?). He later found out through Google employees that the links were not being counted and that they may actually be hurting the client’s site ability to rank. Oops!

3. Recommending People Use H1 Tags with Keywords

This mistake is a little bit more subtle. For years, SEOmoz recommended including keywords in the H1 of pages. After we started doing formal machine learning correlation tests we found out that this tactic didn’t actually help very much at all (including the keywords in normal text in bigger fonts worked essentially the same). This was a shame because it meant we wasted time and energy convincing our clients to update their H1s.

4. Recommending People Not To Use XML Sitemaps

When XML Sitemaps first debuted, Rand and SEOmoz recommended not using this. While the idea was sound in theory (having a XML Sitemap can make it difficult to spot information architecture problems) the observation ended up being outweighed by the impact we saw with the increased indexation rates of sites that employed this tool.

5. Incorrectly Redirecting Linkscape to Open Site Explorer

Recently we decided to 301 redirect all of the old Linkscape reports to our newer, better converting, Open Site Explorer reports in a 1-1 relationship. This was in theory a good idea but unfortunately including various tracking components on the redirect URLs resulted in us losing a significant amount of traffic. We later fixed this with rel=canonical but a lot of the damage was already done. Ouch!

Do you have any lessons you have learned after making some noteworthy mistakes? If so, we would love to hear what you learned in the comments below.

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More often than not, marketers jump into SEO without being fully prepared. Although it is easy to do, it could eventually have harmful effects on the business. In this interview with WebProNews, Heather Lutze, the Director/Owner of the Findability Group and the author of The Findability Formula, explains how marketers need to understand the foundation for setting up an effective search marketing plan in order to have maximum findability.

As she discusses, there are many dangers with jumping into search. For starters, the technicalities can quickly overwhelm people. Search efforts are also often isolated to one division, such as PPC. As a result, businesses could end up missing out on a lot of benefits they could be receiving from search. Another danger is that many marketers think they know what their searchers want, when they actually do not.

“Don’t stand in judgment of your own search, let your searchers tell you what they want,” says Lutze.

She goes on to point out that marketers need to focus on all 3 areas of search. These areas are PPC, SEO, and Social Media. She says if a business really wants to be findable, it needs to be where users expect it to be. Since it’s difficult to know where the users are, she advises being present in all 3 areas.

By utilizing these 3 components, businesses can develop a consistent message across all its channels, which will increase their chances of being findable.

Are you getting the maximum findability out of search?

Posted by randfish

One of the most common questions we receive here at SEOmoz is "What’s the best way to learn SEO?" There are many ways to answer, but in this post, I’m going to cover the responses I give most often and those I’ve seen have the most success. But, before I describe each of these, it pays to understand that not all learning methodologies are the same in style, substance or where they can take you. If you’re completely new to SEO, some of these won’t be appropriate and if you’re already a veteran, others won’t teach you much you don’t already know.

Thus, let’s start with a chart of relative knowledge/experience levels (similar to this old/outdated post on levels of knowledge):

Now that we have some context, let’s dive in to the ways I recommend learning SEO. For each, I’ve provided a description of the process, the ideal starting level(s) (and where you can expect to reach via that methodology) and a list of resources with my notes.

#1 – Free Online Guides

A number of free guides, eBooks and downloadable PDFs exist on the web to help provide insight into SEO. Some are highly comprehensive while others touch only lightly on the topic. The key to being successful with this process is to identify guides that are both up-to-date and accurate in their recommendations. No council exists to regulate the dispersal of SEO information and thus, a few proprietors of free guides can lead you down incomplete or even dead wrong paths.

Recommended for: New to SEO, Aspirant, Journeyman

List of Resources:

• SEOmoz’s Free Beginner’s Guide to SEO (just updated for 2010)
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Guide for Bloggers
• Google’s Starter Guide for Webmasters
• Danny’s Checklist for Learning SEO

Time Investment / Commitment Required: 1-3 hours should get you through any of the guides above

#2 – Published Literary Works

For those who like to curl up with a book, a number of authors/publishers have come out with solid resources in the past couple years. Books have a unique advantage over online guides in that they’re often better written, more carefully edited and can be more easily judged on the reputation of the authors/publishers. Conversely, they are hard to update (even in the book I wrote last year, a few links and references are already broken) and thus, don’t always contain the most up-to-date information.

Recommended for: New to SEO, Aspirant, Journeyman

List of Resources:

• Inbound Marketing by Dharmesh Shah & Brian Halligan
• Search Engine Optimization: Your Visual Blueprint for Effective Internet Marketing by Kris Jones
• Search Engine Optimization Secrets by Danny Dover
• Marketing in the Age of Google by Vanessa Fox
• Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grapone & Gradiva Couzin
• The Art of SEO by Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola, Eric Enge & Stephan Spencer

Time Investment / Commitment Required: The largest of these is ~450 pages, which might take between 4-8 hours depending on how fast you read

#3 – Blogs, Forums & Search Communities

In my opinion, everyone learning SEO can garner value from discovering 3-5 favorite sources of information online and keeping up to date with each on a daily or weekly basis. Forums and blogs pump out a tremendous quantity of content, but just by browsing the headlines and reading teh stories that stand out, you can get exposure to strategies, techniques, news and trends that would otherwise be difficulty to stumble on by yourself.

Many SEOs (myself included) first learned the practice almost entirely through contributions, questions and threads on industry blogs & forums. Today, I’d suggest starting with a base from a free guide or book, then diving into the communities to stay sharp and get individual questions answered. I’ve provided a few of my personal favorite resources below, but will be working on a more comprehensive list in the near future.

Recommended for: All

List of Resources:

• Forums / Q+A
  • Cre8asite Forums
  • SearchEngineWatch Forums
  • Onstartups Answers (SEO)
  • Quora (SEO)
• Blogs
  • Search Engine Land
  • Search Engine Roundtable
  • Search Engine Journal
  • Performable Blog
  • Conversation Marketing
  • Distilled Blog
• Other
  • SEO Alltop
  • Delicious SEO Tags
  • Techmeme

Time Investment / Commitment Required: 30-45 minutes per day or 90 minutes per week (if you aggregate your time into a single slot)

#4 – Building Sites & Earning Rankings

Many in the SEO field will say that building your own sites and practicing SEO in the real world is the only way to learn. I disagree with that message, but I do concur that it’s possibly the most crucial step to advancing your career and abilities.

My view is that if, prior to building a site and attempting to earn some rankings, you have a great mental model of the field, you can build a truly defensible strategy for your site(s). If you simply register a domain that sounds nifty and start trying to rank for a keyword you think is popular, you can get a very warped sense for how to do SEO and what matters in the short, medium and long run. At the very least, read a free guide and engage a bit on some of the online communities.

Once you’ve got a base of knowledge, building a site is the next logical step. I strongly suggest starting small and preferrably with a topic that you’re personally passionate about rather than one that just has high AdSense payouts. I’ll recommend a number of options for building/hosting below, but if you have the technical know-how to configure your own server and write from scratch, that’s a perfectly reasonable alternative (just make sure it’s not too time consuming to leave room for some actual SEO).

Recommended for: Aspirant, Journeyman, Authority

List of Resources:

• Posterous
• Page.ly
• WordPress
• Tumblr
• SquareSpace

Time Investment / Commitment Required: A minimum of 4-5 hours for setup and creation of initial content, and more likely 40-50 hours to produce something high quality and robust and conduct initial off-site SEO/marketing efforts.

#5 – Conferences & Events

If you’re hungry to learn SEO in person, see real life examples and hear stories from the front lines (as well as meeting the practitioners and evangelists), getting out to events is an excellent next step. The last few years has seen an explosion in the quantity and variety of events in the field and many have different foci and target audiences, so be sure to choose the right one for accomplishing your goals. Many of the large conferences are focused on drawing out discussion around topics, advancing the discourse in the field and promoting networking while some smaller events are more specifically geared to pure education or intimate networking.

Recommended for: Journeyman and Above

List of Resources (in order of upcoming dates):

• Blueglass Los Angeles - July 19-20
• SES San Francisco - August 16-20
• SEOmoz PRO Seattle - August 30-31
• SMX East New York - October 4-6
• Inbound Marketing Summit Boston - October 6-7

Time Investment / Commitment Required: Typically 2-4 days plus travel time

#6 – Online Classes

The online online learning series I’m familiar with in this category is Market Motive, but they’re impressive enough to warrant both a category of their own and a recommendation. Founded by Michael Stebbins and John Marshall (who previously founded & sold ClickTracks) along with Avinash Kaushik, Todd Malicoat, Bryan Eisenberg and more, the staff is a who’s who of Internet marketing. When this many great brains get together, the results are smashing. Market Motive combines webinars, phone calls, coursework and more into a comprehensive curriculum. They end the series with a dissertation defense given over the phone and only passing candidates earn certification.

I’ve personally been on a few calls with early entrants and master certification candidates and been seriously impressed. Since I’m recommending them so highly, I connected with the folks at Market Motive, and they’ve put together a discount  for moz readers. You can sign up for MarketMotive using the code "SMZ6TOOLSMC" and get $600 off their master certification course + 3 months of SEOmoz PRO membership FREE. But, make sure to do it in the next 5 days as the upcoming master certication course starts on July 19th.

Recommended for: New to SEO, Aspirant, Journeyman and Authorities/Gurus seeking formal, recognized certification

List of Resources:

•  Market Motive

Time Investment / Commitment Required: Over the course of 90 days, this is a 10-20 hour per week commitment, possibly more when cramming for the dissertation.

The field is certainly much richer with options than when I began, but as we know from the science of conversion, more choices don’t always indicate more actions. Hopefully, the recommendations above have helped to give you a starting point. I’d love to hear from you in the comments about where and how you learned SEO and what you’d recommend to others.

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Posted by Sam Crocker

Good morning Mozzers!

Today we’re going to walk you through some rather basic but far-too-oft overlooked conversion factors specifically for international SEO. Anyone who has had the pleasure of using ecommerce sites in multiple countries may have noticed that as a general rule the sites look pretty similar if not identical. Today we are going to walk you through some of the pros and cons of this approach and how you might actually benefit from mixing things up for different audiences in different countries.

WARNINGS:

1. There is something to be said for having a similar site, brand, and feel that can be recognized all over the world.

2. Some CMS systems do not allow for easy changes to be made for different versions of the site.

3. With Google Translation, many folks are becoming less interested in having multiple sites anyhow.

4. More sites mean more potential problems and things to worry about.

Now, with these warnings out of the way let’s first jump into some of the potential benefits, and then look at some examples. 

Why Change a Good Thing?

Let’s consider an example company that has enjoyed a great deal of success in a country like the US and would like to become a major player in a country like Japan. Now, setting aside some of the logistical nightmares and translation issues we could stick with the templates and design from our original site in hopes of breaking into the Japanese market as a known quantity. After all, our model has worked wonders in the States and is likely to appeal to the Japanese market as well, right?

Well, maybe.

On the other hand, it’s probably worth considering a number of things about the site before we make a decision either way.

How Powerful is my Brand?

First, have we done our market research? It is all well and good if we have experienced success in one market, but it won’t necessarily mean that our brand name means anything to the new market. We don’t need to look too far outside of the field of SEO to realize that market shares and the "major players" can vary greatly from one country to another.

Now, we search marketers may tend to be biased towards Google in our SEO efforts, but we at least are all familiar with Bing and Yahoo! Meanwhile, some countries (China in the example) these "major brand names" may not mean anything. So banking on your "established brand" means very little when exploring a new market- be sure to do your research!

"I want a Pretty Site"

Secondly, what if up means down and down means up. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s not so far off. Colors can mean totally different things from one country to another. And I’m not talking about horoscopes here! This isn’t a simple question of blue means serenity and purple means power there are much more pressing conversion factors to talk about here.

Let’s look at the implications of red and green and up and down. This factor was brought to my attention in a recent blogpost by the folks on the Yahoo Developer Blog and it is a really crucial point to consider- especially for conversions. In the US and most English speaking countries we are accustomed to a simple logic: Green = Good, Red = Bad. This holds from everything to traffic lights, to stock markets. However, in China and Korea the opposite is true.

These two screenshots were taken at the same time. The one on the left was taken from Yahoo! Finance whilst the one on the right was taken from Yahoo! Korea. As you can see, both images are showing the same data, although one of them appears with red arrows for the upward movement of the stock markets and the other appears with green arrows. This may be a simple illustration but it is easy enough to understand how the massive red letters you use to draw attention for falling prices on your US site could cause a bit of confusion.

Browser Usage

Finally, be mindful of the most common browsers in the country you are targeting. Compatibility across all browsers is always advisable but not always achievable. Although you may have built your site in the US with an understanding that most people would be using Chrome or Firefox the same may not be true everywhere else. In fact, as much as we bemoan Internet Explorer in the UK and the US it is still far and away the pre-eminent browser in Japan.

*REMEMBER THIS, because this bit of information may become even more relevant to you after a forthcoming casestudy by Tom which reveals some potentially massive Conversion losses from Internet Explorer users. I fear I may have said too much already, but be sure to watch this space for a link to the article.

 Speaking the Language

Image: Engrish.com

My final suggestion for creating a site outside of your country comes with a word of warning. If this image looks ridiculous to native English speakers, imagine how silly a site built by one of us looks to a native mandarin speaker. Invest the time and effort to find the right person to build the site. If you are looking to take your ecommerce site to a global audience make sure you’re doing it the right way!

Do What Makes Sense!

As you may have realized, some of these seem like common sense but are far too often overlooked. If your site/brand doesn’t have any recognition to speak of make sure you’ve done your market research. It makes perfect sense for a brand like Amazon (without too many "offensive" colors used on any of their sites) to capitalize on their brand recognition across the web. There is no reason for them to invest too heavily in a redesign and a new name- because they can afford to acquire existing brands and rebrand.

However, if you have just enjoyed some excess in your home market and are thinking about taking your ecommerce platform to new heights be sure to consider the impact on usability.

Image: Cartoon Depot

Have I got the colors right? Have I considered the language issues? Have I thought about conversions and browser issues? And perhaps most importantly- have I got the funds to do this the right way at the moment?

If you can’t afford to make the switch properly, perhaps it is better to consider a "friendlier" market that is more similar to your current market and save your global dominance for a later experiment.

*Browser and Search Statistics from StatCounter

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The Web has provided numerous opportunities for businesses including the ability to have global reach. But with that opportunity comes many challenges such as marketing on a global scale. To learn more about global marketing, WebProNews caught up with Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink and Joblr and Kristjan Mar Hauksson of Nordic eMarketing.

As Kennedy points out, a big SEO challenge is language. However, she believes the biggest challenge is enculturation in matters such as finding the right keyword set for a different country. This could be a problem since it may not translate directly. For instance, soccer cleats in the U.S. are called football boots in the UK and something completely different in France.

It’s also important to think about these cultural matters in regards to content, link building, graphic design, and more. Although localization and enculturation are the most important areas, Kennedy says understanding the language barrier is the first step in getting these areas right.

Although Nordic eMarketing is based in Iceland, Mar Hauksson says it has found ways to market its products in a multilingual environment. He also points out that the company understands the impact of culture and realizes that not everyone speaks and uses English.

“When you understand that, you have a much bigger market that you can market towards,” says Mar Hauksson.

At the time of the recording of this interview, Google had recently made the move to stop censoring its search results on Google.cn and was redirecting visitors to Google.com.hk, which it does not censor. While some developments have occurred since that time, it is far from being over. Just last week, Google reported that its operations in China were partially blocked and that Chinese officials were allegedly reviewing its application to operate in the country.

Today, the company released this statement, “We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China.”

Both Kennedy and Mar Hauksson believe it is important to pay attention to the Google/China situation from both a SEO and marketing standpoint.

Kennedy also offers some tips for doing social media globally. Just as understanding culture is critical to SEO, it is also critical to social media. She says marketers need to be aware of what social networks are popular in each country and how the people use and interact with them.

“Social media, by its very definition, depends on the nature of the society where it’s doing business,” explains Kennedy.

Are you embracing marketing on a global level?