Suppose your website does business with both the U. S. and UK. How do you go about optimizing for both? This is a good question, considering there are language differences even if it is English versus English. For instance, “color” versus “colour”, “meter” versus “metre” and “elevator” versus “lift”.
If you use both spellings on the same website, then your text does not read well for your visitors. Also, if one of these words in question, happens to be a keyword for your page, then you’ll dilute the keyword density by going with both spellings.
On the other hand, if you set up two websites, one website as .com and the other as .co.uk in order to capitalize (capitalise) on the top-level domain bias, then you run the risk of incurring a duplicate content penalty from the search engines, particularly Google.
To make matters even trickier, http://www.google.co.uk/ has an option to search “the web” or “pages from the UK”. By picking “pages from the UK” more .co.uk websites appear in the top rankings.
One solutions is to set up two sites, one with .com and one with .co.uk TLD’s and offer alternative spellings on the pages. It will be important also to make these pages different enough to avoid the duplicate content penalty.
Is it really necessary to set up two different websites focusing on each country? The simple answer is no. If you do a UK Google search (pages from the UK), you’ll find some .com sites listed at the top along with all of the .co.uk websites. What is it about the .com sites that get them ranked in the top of the UK listings?
I’ve done a few quick ‘n’ dirty searches of the source code to find that these sites do have references to the UK on these pages. Some use UK in the meta tags, but the most common unifying feature of these sites is that they have at least one link to an external UK website or UK mentioned in their own internal URL’s such as a sub-folder that is part of the URL string. These URL’s are what seems to make the difference.
Anyway, it is worth experimenting with this as a way to bridge the gap between English and English. This search engine optimization firm recommends it. Or is it optimisation?
Here’s a question … what if you want to split your existing site (.com) into two halves … say, US and Canada. This allows one to offer two sets of prices, two sets of “grammar” and so on. Will the site be penalized for repeating content?
By two halves, you mean two different sub-pages? If so, I would also make the content “different enough” by using the h1 tag to say US or Canada and change some of the wording in the body text as well or even add or delete a few lines (especially near the top of the page) as this should avoid the duplicate content penalty.