Last week saw the inaugural International Search Summit, organised by Andy Atkins-Kruger's WebCertain. It also saw my first assignment as an official Mozzer, or at least that was what I presumed when I arrived and found that, despite having registered from my work email address, my name badge had SEOmoz as my employer. Don't worry Rand, I won't invoice you (yet.)

Unfortunately, work commitments meant that I missed the first three sessions, arriving just at the end of the Q&A following the third, including one by Tor Crockatt, who is, as I've said before, one of the best speakers on the circuit. She actually recognised me because someone had forwarded her the post in which I covered one of her presentations and thanked me for the kind words. I'm sure that she was as good as always. 

The first session I actually saw covered the issues of geolocalisation. John Brenn, of WebCertain's Norwegian office, went over all the things that businesses can, but often don't, do to help engines understand where content is meant for. As one would expect, these included having a localised domain (ccTLD) and ensuring that the language on a site is the language spoken by the people you want to read it. You can also 'tell' search engines where content is directed, both by using things like the service within Google's Webmaster Tools that allows you to specify a country your site is targeted at, and by ensuring that the language is specified in a page's meta data (especially as by default it will generally be set as English.)

As with any form of SEO links also play a part, and building inbound links from sites within the targeted country are going to give the engines a pretty good idea which areas the content is relevant for. He also briefly looked at issues relating to IP addresses and explained that whilst it is possible to reverse your IP to make it seem like a site is hosted somewhere it's not, organisations like RIPE NCC do a pretty thorough job of working all this stuff out and publishing it. And if they can, you've got to think that the likes of Google can as well.

The second speaker was Kevin Starling of Exalead, a new search engine. His was quite an interesting presentation but was, to all intents & purposes, a pitch. Exalead certainly has some pretty clever services, such as its "soundslike" function, which allows you to search phonetically, and its ability to detect stems (such as the fact that the French words prevoir & prevoit are the same), but until I hear of anyone actually using it, I'm not sure how useful any of this will be (it seems that its main business is in enterprise search, so it's possible people are using it without even realising.) 

The session on Global Online PR was also, in my opinion, a bit basic. Certainly the fact that you can use newswires to target news sources in different countries is nothing new. I also feel that newswires are only really ever going to be as good as the content; i.e., if the story of your release doesn't get picked up by a blog or newspaper site, it's likely to have little value (surely engines can tell that newswires are just paid links, in that you get charged if you want to add optimised links?). That said, Kristjan Mar Hauksson of Nordic eMarketing said, when I raised this in the Q&A, that he had seen campaigns which only used newswire services and had significant successes.

Sante Achille then looked at how one should approach blogging internationally. He ran through the most flexible blogging platforms for those wishing to blog in more than one language (WordPress, Movable Type & Serendipity). He also explained that he felt it was perfectly OK to have more than one language on a blog, so long as they're not both on the same page (excluding the navigation); his explanation was along the lines of Rand's rising tide theory (that the bigger the site, the more links, the better.) And finally he talked about a WordPress plugin he had developed called Blogslot, which allows you to have categories in more than one language.

Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink then gave a very thorough overview of the opportunities that Facebook opens up for marketers. I won't cover them here because, well, frankly, if you don't know them already, you probably ought to go back to the main blog and check out some of Jane's posts. Personally I'd have been interested to hear a similar session on Orkut (the biggest network in India now, apparently) or even a network I don't even know about but which is big outside of the US or UK. But that's Facebook I guess, always stealing someone else's coverage.

Following lunch Andy had scheduled a session specifically designed to beat the digestion-based lull that often hits a conference, with a session where he, Dixon Jones of Receptional, & Kristjan Mar Hauksson all had to give examples of major search marketing howlers (i.e., where big brands make obvious mistakes due to ignorance or lack of attention). It was a very funny session, especially due to its competitive nature, which meant that Andy spent almost as long being rude about Dixon's examples as he did going through his own. None of them, however, covered what I find the most amazing howler, that of a search engine which doesn't understand the importance of canonicalisation.

Next up was a session entitled Dealing With Asia (I don't need to explain what it was about, do I?) The first speaker was Barry Lloyd of MakeMeTop, which started as a search marketing agency but is now a tools provider. As one of the very first to be given access to the Baidu API, Barry certainly knew what he was talking about. He pointed out what ought to be obvious, but yet is often forgotten, which is that all Asian countries are different (although there seems to be a similarity in that Google is not the most popular engine in a large number of them.)

He also pinpointed some less obvious dangers, not just in terms of search marketing but also of running a business in Asia, such as the fact that if Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macao are referred to as countries when they're offered in registration forms as places of residence, your company is likely to be banned by the Chinese government. D'oh! He also explained that many major Western analytics packages simply can't deal with Aisian languages because of the different character sets.

Some of the most interesting points raised related to how Baidu actually works. Not only are some ads sold on a CPM basis, but it is essentially possible for all of the first page of results to be paid ads, as ads are often shown in the same way as we would expect organic listings to be displayed. This means that in competitive sectors, it simply may not be worth optimising your site for Baidu.

Michael Bonfils of SEM International then ran through an impressive amount of statistics to get people thinking about the differences between the Asian markets and those we are more familiar with. These included the fact that whilst China may now have the largest internet population (having recently overtaken the US), the average salary is in the region of $140, so they don't have as much to spend. You therefore need to be sure that it's worth the investment in time & resources that doing business in China will take.

He also showed the differences in design between East & West (face-to-face contact is still seen as very important in many Asian cultures, so you will often find mascots or icons on Asian sites) and ran through the search landscape in a number of different countries, many of which had Google in second, third, or even, in South Korea, almost nowhere (although Google does power the second biggest South Korean search engine). His explanation for why Google does so badly in Korea is an interesting one: apparently the complexity of a product is often thought to relate to its quality. Therefore, Apple & Google, with their simplicity of design (which we often look at as being a good thing) are, in South Korea, often considered to be a bad thing.

We were then presented with the findings of some research that WebCertain has done to how well optimised the companies that make up the FTSE 100 (the British equivalent of the Dow Jones Index) are internationally. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they often weren't. Less than 20% of those they looked at (as not all of the FTSE 100 had sites in more than one language) had translated URLs, whilst less than 50% had localised domains.  Some had extraordinary errors, including error pages on international sites being written in English (I hope we can all see the error there).

Unfortunately, they wouldn't release the full rankings, as they wanted it to be about rewarding those who were doing it well, rather than shaming those doing it badly, so here is the top 10:

1. GSK
2. Shell
3. Sage
4. Unilever
5. Experian
6. Johnsson Matthew
7. Thomas Cook
8. 3i
9. G4S
10. Standard Life

Having worked for one of the companies listed (but which didn't make the Top 10), I can understand why some of these mistakes happen. Often corporate sites are not directly revenue generating and so it can be hard to get the resources needed to ensure mistakes aren't made. As Andy said, that's not an excuse, but it does mean that we should all be nice to those working in-house at these companies.

The session on avoiding mistakes with international content management systems covered a number of issues that had already been touched on at some point or another in the day. But Kristjan, from Nordic eMarketing, is such an amusing presenter that it really didn't matter. And anyway, the things he mentioned were so important that they were worth repeating. These include the fact that you need to consider whether a CMS can deal with different character sets, or whether it will localise/translate.

Finally, there were a couple of sessions on international link building, in one of which Dixon pointed out the obvious 'holes' in PageRank by demonstrating that British Airways has a lower PR than American Airlines, despite having more links from better sources. It gets said at every conference, but is worth repeating - don't get obsessed with the little green bar! 

It was really great to spend a day listening to people discuss topics other than Google and link buying and, if you're in London, I'd definitely recommend getting along to the next Summit in November. I certainly plan to be there...I wonder if I'll still be working for SEOmoz? ;)

Ciarán is the SEO & Social Media Director of British digital marketing agency Altogether Digital. His English is OK, he can get by in French & can count to ten in Dutch.