These days pretty much no matter where you are located in the world, when you get online you want and expect content to be readily accessible and available. With the prevalence of high speed connections and ever-improving mobile infrastructures, users don't have the patience to sit around while a page that's being hosted on a server halfway around the world loads. And while you're optimizing for international SEO, you'll want to think about where your server is located, not only because of how the distance may impact your site's performance, but more importantly, how it may affect customers in the countries that you're trying to do business in.
So of course, you'll want to make sure that your server is responsive for speed and performance. You'll discover that there are many testing tools on the market that can analyze your site's performance from locations all around the world. And some of these tools are free,while other premium tools that will also automate site monitoring and things like that will come at a price. For the purposes of this course, we'll take a look at one of the tools you can freely use at webpagetest.org. This tool's pretty simple. You enter your site address, you select a test location, and even a browser type if you'd like to benchmark that against other major browsers.
There are some advanced settings where you can set connection speeds or tell it to block certain elements of the site, but for today, let's take a look at how my own site will perform for someone accessing our website in Seoul, South Korea. Now, it's important to note that my company's primary hosting is located in the northeast of the United States. The results show me areas that we're doing well and other areas where we can improve so that it performs better for this particular location. For example, one area I clearly need to focus on is a reduction in that first byte time.
I'll likely rerun this test in a few more locations that I'm interested in and I'll pass these recommendations to our web team and I'll monitor any improvements in our analytics tools over time. And a side benefit of optimizing our site's performance is not only making it more accessible to our overseas users, but it will also speed up access for search engines.Remember, site performance is a known ranking factor for Google and many overseas search engines use this in their algorithms as well. As a side note, you'll notice that one of the factorsevaluated by webpagetest is the usage of content delivery networks, or CDNs.
The allow you to host assets like images, videos, script files, and other elements on networksthat span the globe and when users access your site, all those larger files are going to be delivered, not from your main server, but instead by the network of servers closest to where they physically are. This can be a very straightforward way to improve global performance that you can look into with your web team. So speed and performance are clearly important to both people and search engines located around the world. But another consideration is how strong the ranking and geotargeting signals are that you are sending.
Of course, all of your traditional search engine optimization rules apply, but you'll also need to start thinking about geotargeting. This could be as simple as choosing the appropriateccTLDs for your country domain name, or the structure of sub-domains and sub-folders that you've chosen. And one of the easiest things that you can do is provide the search engines with this information in their webmaster tools to explicitly tell them which country you're targeting with which set of pages. In Google Webmaster Tools, you can find geotargeting in the International Targeting feature.
Other things that we'll get into later in this course include seeking out links from other geographically relevant sites and locations. And of course, using some specific on-page technical elements specific to international sites. And we've already looked at the options you have for building out your site's structure in a previous video. Last, we have to realize that not every organization has the resources and infrastructure available to launch web servers in every country in which they do business. And in many cases, this is going to be just fine. As you're probably now aware, SEO is about trade-offs and making as many performance improvements as possible, while doing what you can to ensure geotargeting is clear can go a long way in improving your international search visibility and local users' experiences.
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