I’ve got a fairly large international SEO project a head of me, so I’ve been scouring the internet to learn everything I can about the best ways to appear in search engines in other countries.  Here are seven pretty basic tips to international SEO:

1.  Identify the language with the Meta tag: <meta name=”Language” content=”CN”>   (for China)
2. Use domain extensions of the country (.fr, .co.uk, .cn)
3. Provide crawlable text using the native language.
4. Include street addresses within the country
5. Obtain inbound links from the sites in the country you wish to do SEO.
6. Host the site in the country
7. Spell words accordingly for similar languages (”optimization” in the US vs. “optimisation” in the UK)

Here’s a great illustration showing the above.  

According to Google Trends the U.S. ranks 10th in the number of searches on the keyword “SEO.” The list in descending order:

1. India
2. Czech Republic
3. Japan
4. Phillippines
5. Romania
6. Thailand
7. Spain
8. United Kingdom
9. Australia
10. United States

What explains this phenomenon?