SEO for product known by different names

Question

If you're selling widgets, we all know that having "Bob's Widgets" in the title and the H1 gives you a better ranking in Google when people search for "widgets".

But what if, as someone explained to me the other day, their product is known by different names in different parts of the world?

In the US, it's called a Widget. In Canada, it's called a Flidget. In Australia, it's called a Zidget. There's really no official name for it, just informal names.

Meta-tags are no problem, but apart from that, what's the best way to cope with that situation? Just make separate pages? You can't have 3 H1s on the page. One H1 which says "Widgets, (aka Flidgets, Zidgets)"?

Or do I just trust that Google is smart enough and some magical taxonomy database groups those three words together as the same thing?

EDIT: This question got downvoted simply because it's about SEO? How bizarre. If you even bother to read the question, you can see I'm not trying to game the system or get away with anything. I have a genuinely interesting question and a valid client need.

Please note also, that I always use semantic HTML, I am well aware of how search engine rankings work, and I'm not trying to get away with anything shady.

If my client was selling beer, I would simply use semantic HTML to put the word "beer" first and foremost. If I was selling beer to French people, I would make another page in French and do the same with "biere". But imagine for a second that beer isn't called "beer" in other English-speaking nations. Imagine it's called "reeb". How do I correctly, semantically code an English-language page when different English-language users will be searching using a different string, but searching for the same thing.

Answer 1

One option is to localize pages for the different target regions you are interested.

If you use a local domain, google will give it priority on default searches on that country. When I hit www.google.com, it redirects me to www.google.com.mx, and any search I do tends to display high results from mexico domains. I actually have to hit a couple options, when I don't want that behavior.

I also think google has an option to map parts of the site to a region, so you can keep the single domain.

Update: Regarding the beer example, you can localize per country (which is what I mention above). Actually its not that of a special need, since english british and english US have their differences.

The talk has been language agnostic, but consider how .net handle resources. Lets say the current request is being processed for en-GB, and you look for a resource (i.e. a text, image, etc). It will first try to find the resource for the specific culture: en-GB, if it isn't found it will look under the more general en (and then in the default resource file).

The previous allows you to selectively localize what you really need on the more specific resource files. If you only need to localize the resources with the key beerName, you can just configure that on the specific languages and leave the rest.

Answer 2

HTML meta-tags were originally created for the purpose of embedding exactly such metadata into a webpage. But because of the SEO industry and the commercialization of the web, meta-tags like 'keywords' are no longer used by major search engines.

With all of the advances in page ranking algorithms and intelligent search robots over the years, there's really not much to do in terms of active 'search engine optimization' for legitimate websites. In today's search environment, all you have to do is optimize your site for your visitors, and it will automatically be optimize for searching.

So you can passively optimize your site's ranking by doing any(or all) of the following:

• Use good spelling and writing etiquette (like not writing your entire site in caps or text-message-speak)
• Format your pages using proper markup. (Title your document, mark your headings with H1/H2/etc., delimit your paragraphs, and so on and so forth.)
• Abide by established web standards and write well-formed code.
• Weed out broken links and make sure your site works properly.
• Don't use pop-ups, cover your site with banner ads, or otherwise bombard visitors with advertising
• Don't link to disreputable websites

Simply put, make your site as user-friendly and as accessible as possible. If your site is useful to visitors and provides valuable content, most major search engines like Google or Yahoo! are smart enough to rank it fairly. Your ranking may be modest at first. But if you're genuinely supplying quality content then, as your site becomes better established on the web, other sites will start linking to you, increasing your search ranking.

And if other webpages linking to your site use the various names & nicknames your product is referred to by, then your site will also be associated with those names/keywords (that's how Google Bombing works). Google also tracks synonymous search terms and is even smart enough to recommend related/alternative search terms in some cases.

On the other hand, if you're creating a spam site or the 10 millionth affiliate marketing website with the same exact products and content as the other 9,999,999 sites of the same exact nature, then expect your search engine ranking to be reasonably poor.

It's generally only websites with no original content and that provide no legitimate value to visitors that require active (black hat) SEO techniques to gain a decent ranking--polluting search results in the process. Otherwise, if you're actually building a useful website, then just optimize it for your visitors and let Google/Yahoo! do their job.

Answer 3

The anchor text of your inbound links is a lot more important than the tags you use. So try getting links to your page with both "beer" and "reeb". As long as you'll get enough links with both terms, you'll do well in SERPs, no matter the keywords you use in it.