The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language - but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets.

The other new development which is currently being looked at, according to a senior Google source, is the addition of a tool within webmaster tools whereby you can specify the country your site relates to. The countries will be listed in a drop down list - and you’ll almost certainly only be able to choose once country per site.

For a long time it has been a problem if you site was a .com site with no history of activity in a country for Google to pick out the right ‘bucket’ in which to list your site. For some this was an embarrasment - for others a major business hurdle. Matters were worse for those .coms hosted in a country other than the one they were targeting - perhaps for business political or content management system reasons. The result was you might be targeting France with a site hosted in Norway - but not end up appearing in the ‘Pages Francophones’ of Google.fr - even if the language of the site was French.

The simplest way of solving this problem has always been to have local country domains in which case - contrary to what one SES panelist advised in San Jose, the hosting location becomes irrelevant. For many, this isn’t practical - hence the reason why some have chosen to host locally to get around the problem.

These two developments combined will help international SEO specialists manage their projects with less frustration!

The domains will cover China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other asian countries.

LinguaWeb is unique in that it utilizes the Alexa search engine and performs an automatic computer generated translation of the results and related websites into Bahasa Melayu. It’s just like Altavisa’s Babblefish, expect of course babblefish doesn’t support Bahasa Melayu. Currently the market penetration of LinguaWeb isn’t all that spectacular but is sure to grow, and other search methods like it are also likely to grow.

Optimizing your website for bilingual, computer generated translation search engines isn’t all that difficult because most of the work is identical to your current SEO strategy with the translation being done on the search engine side. My recommendation is to use simple sentences which will also improve readability and to avoid idioms, because they almost never translate correctly.

“Fluency in English and Romanian is required. Bulgarian language skills are a plus. ” sounds like Google has decided to focus on Romania for now. With an online population of over 5 000 000 users (CIA’s World Factbook 2004) Romania indeed seems more attractive compared with the 1 800 000 internet users in Bulgaria.

Form the same page on Google’s website it is visible that the company is expanding its international activities in many directions. There is a strong focus on South America as the list includes Chile, Argentina, Columbia, Costa Rica, Peru and Puerto Rico. The Far East also gets a lot of attention from the giant in search. Regional representatives are to be hired in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Oceania.

Anyone who has used Gmail understands how revolutionary the service is because of its 2.5GB+ of free storage and unique ability to group emails into conversations. e-marketer sees Gmail as the best way to build an individual profile to advertise products. Doubleclick has tried for years to accomplish this through a network of media sites and individual profile surveys but fails in comparison to Gmail’s 2.5GB+ of a user’s archived emails.

What’s interesting as it relates to multilingual search is the aggressive rollout of thirty-eight different language character sets. After all, how many Tagalog language users could there be? Certainly a Gmail user in Thailand is worth a fraction of a comparable US consumer but with Google lagging or non-existent in the search markets for many developing countries; the superiority of Gmail can shift the tides. A complete “individual profile” is an uncanny advantage when entering a new market.

If you were not aware, Google has been serving up Adwords in Thai for quite sometime.

The idea of multimedia and text messages on a mobile phone is a somewhat foreign concept in the rest of the world but makes sense in Thailand where almost everyone carries a cellular phone and few own a personal computer with internet access. M-Web is trying to gain mass acceptance of its online advertising engine by leveraging mobile popularity.

The divergence can also be seen from the mobile carrier side. All you have to do is shop around for the latest cell phone model to see that internet, photo sharing, and text messaging, are all standard. Add this with unlimited GPRS mobile plans and the internet is a touch away virtually anywhere in Thailand. As a marketer, you can’t ignore the power of the internet on mobile devices.

Americans are also catching on as trendy companies in the states are using mobile messaging to create a unified marketing front. A few weeks ago an article reported on Google using text messages to enable new gmail accounts. They claim it’s only for verification purposes…but there may be more to it than meets the eye.