Lucky Hit 24

If you have created different language versions for your website, have you then made sure that visitors end up directly on the right language version when finding you in the Dutch search engine (translation: Nederlandse zoekmachine)?

In the next 2 minutes you are going to learn how to have visitors arrive on the correct language version according to their preference. Many companies make the mistake of submitting their website ONLY to the global search engines, ignoring the many local search engines.

Here is how you go about it. Register the country-specific domain names for your local web pages. Then submit your country-specific URL to the local search engines in order to favour this URL in their search results. Otherwise the first search results will be picked up randomly by the search engine´s spider.

As an example let´s say that the fictional company Candy Shop Inc. apart from English has a website in French, German and Dutch targeting the markets of France, Germany and The Netherlands.

They should therefore register the following domains for Candyshop:

- .fr (France)
- .de (Germany)
- .nl (The Netherlands)

After redirecting the domains to the correct language web pages, they submit the web site to the local search engines in France using the French, German and Dutch URLs instead of their main URL. French visitors will then find the French version of the web site to appear first.

STOP and ask yourself this question. If you have already made the effort to translate your website, why not register the country-specific domains? Have you already initiated this strategy but have not completed it 100%? Make the decision today to register your country-specific domains and make the steps described.