I suggest that one of the best ways to study this is to actually BE in other countries, but this is not always an option for site owners. Despite the fact that I’ve built multi-lingual websites over the years, this was my first opportunity to take my own computer along and just see what happens.

I’ve just returned from a three week trip overseas, including stays in the UK and France. This is a quick, first post on what I discovered. Since this was a family trip, not a business trip, I didn’t have as much time to play around online as I would have liked – but I will expand on this subject as soon as I can.

For a first-timer, the first challenge is getting an internet connection. I brought along my laptop (with a universal power converter) and made an effort to go online every day, no matter where I was. My first try was sitting outside Frankfurt airport in between flights. My trusty laptop detected a half-dozen possible networks, but of course I didn’t know if any of them were free & open networks. I picked one that looked OK, but it required a user login. I stopped at that point, not wanting to “experiment” with my computer too much or expose it to unknown risks.

(Note: My laptop, at least, came home virus-free. Wish I could say the same for myself. When it comes to your computer, don’t take chances if you are not sure what is going on!)

The second challenge is e-mail while overseas. You should definitely have a universal email account before you go.

Since I had missed a connecting flight, I HAD to contact my party at the other end to inform them. I discovered that the Frankfurt airport had little internet kiosks here & there. You just prepay for so many minutes with your credit card, then go online. From here you can use a universal email account such as Gmail or Yahoo mail, etc. This was a lifesaver. But I also discovered that keyboards are different in different countries! It took me half my online time just to find the @ sign

Next stop, a private home in France with a home wireless network. Since they had not put in a security lock, I was able to easily connect, surf, and use my Gmail account to stay in touch with ground control back home. In France I got my first real look at Google from within another country. The Google ‘home page’ defaulted to www.google.fr with everything in French, but with a few additional features – there were links for searching for pages only in French (or only in the domain .fr), or alternatively, switching to Google in English. (It was also just as easy to navigate to www.google.com .) Since I was doing my best to learn French, I stuck with Google.fr as much as possible but did not restrict my searches to only French pages. The upshot is that if you search for something, you’ll get search results for domains/pages in France, a page in French from another country, and the usual world-wide results for that matter. The world is your oyster.

Next stop, Scotland, at a nice B&B outside Edinburgh. They also had an open home wireless network available at no extra charge, and not requiring any login. (They were safe enough to do this, being up on the moors of the Pentland hills.) Here it was easy-peasy to do anything I needed – no discernable difference from being in the states at all.

Next stop, England, staying at a chain hotel. Here I discovered that they charge through the nose for an internet connection from your room – no thanks! They did have 2 computers in the lobby for public use. You prepay for so many minutes at the front desk,, they give you an access code, and you’re quickly online. But it ain’t exactly cheap.

Final stop, a hotel at the Nice airport. Here too, they charge a lot for in-room internet access. But since I was only there overnight (actually, half a night – had to get up at 4 AM for the flight home!) I did not spin the wheel and try my luck with their internet service. This hotel did not have any public computers available.

I will write more about how to build and optimize sites and pages for international exposure, how character sets fit in, and other topics, as soon as possible.

Part of this trip involved a major family reunion – I now have relatives in several continents and countries, including Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, all the UK, France, and I think Italy too. As time and politeness allows I will ask friends and family what their online experience is like from their location, and pass on whatever I learn.

Meanwhile I am catching up on my “real” work back here at home

Sponge

Now that you know who you’d like to get links from, what’s the best way to go about it?

Let me give you a real case study with my client, Cormark International – an exotic wood supplier for woodworking and woodturning.

Though the company has been in business for over 27 years, their site is relatively new, and they have only recently added a shopping cart for retail woodworking supplies.

They didn’t have many inbound links going for them – so here is what I’ve done:

1. I started by making sure their site and business are listed in all the “big” Local searches. I also did a few quality directory submissions, just to get the ball rolling. Plus I linked to them from my business site under Clients.

2. I researched competitor links and did online searches. I followed the breadcrumb trails. I manually visited and scoped out as many related woodworking sites I could find. Then I whittled down my list. Remember – quality is more important than quantity. In the process, I also uncovered some really great sites that were not linking to any competitors.

3. I built a Resources page for Cormark, and populated it with a couple dozen outbound links to sites that we all agreed were quality resources for Cormark’s site visitors, whether they link back to us or not. For example, I looked for sites that offered guidance, tips, tools, and free woodworking plans. I also looked for woodworkers’ sites offering items for sale that do not compete with Cormark.

4. I checked each desired site for specific information on exchanging links. Some have emails and forms available for that, and I used them. The key point here is – check out who owns the site, and whether they have any specific information regarding requesting links.

One site I found, www.kevinsbrady.net  contains a page amounting to a manifesto on how to request a link the right way – and it is a beautiful example of how link requests should be approached! Please read his page – he explains quite clearly as a site owner how to get through to him, or how to end up in his trash bin

5. The most important way to ensure you actually get some quality links is to do your homework right, find out as much as you can about the other site and the owner, and contact them directly – by name – with a personal letter or email.

6. I am continuing with the link request process, contacting a few sites at a time. There is some “suspicion” that if you suddenly load up your site with 100 inbound links, you’ve taken a frowned-upon shortcut rather than acquire decent, quality inbound links the “natural” way.

Link Campaigning is not the time to take shortcuts! Do it right and you will build up good links to your site. And don’t forget, as a site owner, part of your responsibility is to provide good links of your own to your visitors!

Give them a reason to come back.

Give other sites a good reason to link to you.

I have always recommended to my clients that they provide outbound links. It is a way of giving your visitors added value for visiting your site.

You also want to have other quality sites linking to yours. Despite social media and personalized search, inbound links still count for a lot with the search engines.

So how do you go about linking up and forming a good “community” of links for your site?

First of all, YOU need to have a way to link out to other sites. It can be a separate page (a Links or Resources page – name it what you will) or you can use text-based links placed directly in your site’s copy in appropriate places. These outbound links need to be easy to find – not a hidden or buried page.

How do you find quality sites?

No question this is going to take some time, but there are some tools available to help shorten the process.

1. Start with your customers, business associates,  or sites that you have found valuable!

2. Know who is already linking to you. You can usually discover who is already linking to you by investigating your site statistics provided for free by virtually all site hosting companies these days. Check out their sites, and if you think they would be helpful to your site visitors, then by all means link back to them.

3. Find out who is linking to your competitors. If a site links to your competitor, they might also be willing to link to you. Discovering this is tougher. You will probably need some software help. I use WebCEO for many purposes, and discovering links to competitors is one of the available tools. But it’s professional, expensive software. If you’re a sole operator in charge of your site, there are a couple of other options:

www.LinkDiagnosis.comis a free tool you can use. It derives its information from the Yahoo database. It also works better with FireFox and they provide a FireFox Plugin for getting the most out of their tools.

www.Link-Assistant.com : Not free (as of this writing, $147 but that’s very reasonable in this biz.) Their software bundles a lot of great tools for tracking links all over the place, as well as some very useful tools for weeding out the clunkers and determining if a prospective site is using naughty SEO tactics. I have not purchased and tried this software yet, but it’s on my list! This program was recommended to me by Ty, my good buddy and Internet Marketing Pro par excellence over at www.redvwbus.com .

4. This is the most time consuming method but tried and true. Follow the breadcrumb trails manually. If you discover a good site that links to you, check out all their other links. Then keep following. It sounds simple – and it is. And it works. It just takes time.

5. You can do a search on any search engine using terms directly related to your business, see what results come up, and check out the sites. This is a bit more hit-and-miss, but one thing it is good for is locating large directory or specialty sites where you can get free or reasonably-priced listings and links.

6. Don’t neglect to get your business listed in Google Local, Yahoo Local, and any authoritative, well-established local websites for your area. For example, www.Asheville.com is a case in point (by no means the only one) for my own local area.

7. Participate online! Use user groups and social media (such as Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Facebook, just a few examples) to communicate with other people in your business or related businesses. You can find some great sites to link to – and find folks who will happily link to you – with social media/networking. The key word here is participate. Don’t go for hard sell, it won’t work. Be a helpful, contributing community member and the links will follow.

I have a client, let’s call them the Friendly Brothers. They provide a specific service in my geographic region. They have only one big competitor – let’s call them the Gorillas.

In all my years I’ve never seen anything as down and dirty – and stupid – as what the Gorillas have been up to.

The Friendly Brothers and I caught them running PPC ads using the Friendly Brothers’ trademarked business name. We caught them in the act, and used our handy-dandy “Print Screen” button. We now have permanent proof of it.

For that particular problem, a Cease and Desist appears to have made the ads go away – so far.

Then, I discovered that when you do a search for the Friendly Brothers dot.com, some very suspicious-looking results pages were coming up in the Top 10 listings. The listed pages contained my Friendly Brothers’ business name, but the URLS were definitely not related to our site or any SEO work we’d done.

Like a hound who’s just been shown a pile of Gorilla poop, I was on the trail.

Turns out these Top 10 listings were originating from a Classifieds website in Canada. There were a dozen or so ads on this site, advertising the same service, using my client’s business name, and a telephone number that “just happened to” be exactly the same as my client’s, except for the area code. And this info was showing up in the search engine results.

We decided to call the number. What we got was a residence, and the mumbled explanation was that the husband “used to be” in this business but wasn’t anymore – we could call again after he got home from work and talk to him.

Now, it is possible that it is a coincidence. I guess. But I’m not falling for it.

Fortunately the classifieds site has links for reporting spam and illegal/infringing ads. So far, we haven’t been able to backtrack the actual Gorilla that placed the ads – and they could have used a mule anyway.

The Friendly Brothers and I are still on the trail, and it’s a hot one.

The moral of the story is that if you try any of these stupid tricks, you can be easily found out AND find some letters from lawyers in your mailbox.

In this day and age, establishing your Brand and Credibility is critical on the web. Protect those assets. Be vigilant! It’s a jungle out there