Targeting Sections of a Single Website to Multiple Geo Locations

Location based SEO activities are the best way to get targeted traffic from a specific location. There are many types of websites that offers products and services which are availed by people from a particular country or location. In this case rather than targeting the website for a large global area, it is better to concentrate your SEO activities to that particular country.

Google’s Webmasters tools is of a great help in geo targeting the SEO activities as we can specify a location that needs to be targeted. This option is available once we submit and verify our website using Google’s Webmasters tools. While you submit your website to Google Webmasters tool, you can select a single country from where your site needs traffic from. This option is good as long as you have only a single country to target.
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Now Submit URLs to Google on Demand

Google Webmasters Tool has now introduced a new feature which helps you to ask Google to index your web pages on demand. The new feature comes with the Fetch as Googlebot option in the Webmasters tools which helps you to see  how your web page appears to Google. If there is no issues in fetching your web page, you can see a “Success” status on the same page. Now, you can also see an option saying “Submit to Index” and once you click that button your particular page would be submitted to be indexed by Google.

Once you submit the web page to be indexed by Google, the Googlebot with crawl that ULR within a day. After that Google will consider it for including in their index, but they do not guarantee to index all the submitted URLs. Google would be still using their regular process which they used to imply on the URLs that were discovered before this update.
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Use Google’s Parameter Handling to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues

While developing or working with a dynamic site all of use might have come across the problem of duplicate content in one or other way. This case arises mainly with dynamic sites such as shopping cart or similar sites. In these kind of sites there would always be different URLs with the same content or product details. The URLs in these case will be different with either session IDs or other parameters. But such a situation will result in creating a confusing situation for Google on which URL to ignore and which one to be considered as the original one.

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Something About Google Webmasters Tool

Google Webmasters Tool is an important tool which helps to diagnose and analyze your website. This tool is not a traffic analytics tool like Google Analytics, but provides other important figures and facts which can be interpreted for the better performance of the website. Google Webmasters tool helps in diagnosing the technical and SEO related issues of a website in an efficient manner. It has a lot of excellent features and new features are constantly being added. [Read more…]

Setting Geographic Target for Your Site with Google Webmasters Tool

Geographic Targeting or Geo targeting of the websites need to be done if you want to promote your website for a particular geographical region.  For example, if you have a Canada based site and uses .com as the TLD (Top Level Domain), you would not get any priority or importance in Google Canada Search results. In this case your site would be getting search visibility based on the global searches, and would be missing many potential visitors from Canada. To get priority for Google Canada search results, wither your site should be hosted in Canada, or you should use .ca as your TLD.

Google has provided an excellent option to do this through Google Webmasters Tool. The Geographic Targeting feature in Google Webmasters helps you to tell Google, the geographic area your site is supposed to be promoted and given importance. This tool is free and easy to use, as anyone with a Google account can use this amazing and interesting webmaster tool.

The steps for setting the Geographic Targeting for a website that is using Google Webmasters tool are given below. (I am not telling how here how to submit the site to Google Webmasters tool)

1) Log into your Google Webmasters tool.

2) From the home page click on your website name which is listed there.

3) Now you have entered the Dashboard of Google Webmasters tool for your website.  Expand the Site Configuration link seen on the top left of the Dashboard.

4) From the expanded links click on the link named Settings and go to the Settings page.

5) There is a Check Box option with the text Geographic target. Enable that link and you will see a drop down list which contains the list of Countries.

6) Select the Country and press the Save button.

Thats it.  You have set the Geographic targeting for your website for that particular country. I hope the mentioned steps are clear to you.  I have done this for my clients and have worked for me.