SEO in France

[LouiseB]

Hi All,

Does anyone have any advice on optimizing my site in France? We are a UK based company looking to expand our operations into France. To start with we shall not have an office in France although in time we hope to open one if this venture proves succesful. I think this may stop us from having a .fr domain, however I do have the .com so I am thinking this should be ok.

I have a French guy translating my site and generally making it more appealing to a French audience. My French guy tells me that Google is their favourite search engine (which came as no surprise). With my site translated will I rank just a good as in the English google or will I need to start again?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards

Louise

[french dread]

Greetings Louise,
Default Google results are the same with google.com and google.fr so concerning your english website you should see no difference in rankings
Concerning the french website, if SEO work is well done, you should rank better on french keywords than for english words as they are less french speaking websites than english ones.
The major SE and directories you have to work on for the french audience are google, voila.fr, yahoo.fr, dmoz.fr, aol.fr, lycos.fr, msn.fr.
Hope this help, you can contact me if you have any questions.

[LouiseB]

Thanks for the reply. Do you think not having the .fr domain will affect things?

kind regards

Louise

[french dread]

It is not so important as tons of french companies use .com tlds.
And it is also more easy to obtain .com than .fr which requires more administrative conditions (but am not a specalist of somain names laws)

[LouiseB]

Thanks for all your help.

Louise:D