[Lizard]

I have a client that needs to have a presence in a number of European countries. In addition, each of the country specific sites will be written in the native language.

My initial thoughts on the best way to approach this would be to purchase country specific domains (www.mydomain.co.uk, www.mydomain.de, etc) and host in that specific country.

I don’t have to worry about duplicate content because each site in a specific language.

Do you feel that this is the best approach, or is there a better way?

Appreciate your thoughts.

Robert

[Gibbs]

I would say that individual domains (hosted in that country like you said) is the better option but will require more work. If you don't want to take that approach you can use sub-domains hosted in different countries (like fr-fr.website.com for france) or have unique directory such as website.com/fr/.

Personally, although I've only ever had to target international and UK sites, I would go with the unique domain method if I had the time and resources to do it. Take a look at some top sites and see how they're doing it. Also you will want to keyword research every language as popular, or uncompetitive, terms will be different.