SEO training-, kennis- en adviescentrum › SEO forum › SEO vragen en discussies › Which SEO methods are effective on Google.nl ? › Reply To: Which SEO methods are effective on Google.nl ?
Dear Cata,
Startpagina’s are a phenomenon unique to The Netherlands and even acknowledged by Google (Matt Cutts uses it as example sometimes). They are very topic centered (subdomain name) mini hubpages created by enthousiastic people that are administrators of those pages. All links (except the nofollowed ad links) are manually added to the page by the administrators. Startpagina gets about 1 million visitors per DAY. So it’s not just about getting ‘juicy links’ but also about getting targeted visitors.
The strength of the pages depends on the quality of links on it. Some people create very high quality link pages that get very high search engine rankings (for example: geografie (geography), look for geografie.startpagina.nl).
Other options for promoting:
– guest post blogging (for example: your experiences with optimizing for Romanian sites)
– forum comments
– finding more directories and startpages like startpagina. You could use https://www.linkbuildingtool.nl to find those, but the tool is only available in Dutch for now (will take a couple of months before the English version is launched)
– press releases
– tools and widgets
– Google Maps (if you have an office here)
– launching a Dutch site (.nl domain) with your primary (Dutch) keywords
– blogposts and promotion through social bookmarking sites (Nujij.nl for example)
– Dutch Facebook page, Twitter page, Hyves page, YouTube page
– find business partners, suppliers etc. that are willing to exchange links
– Marktplaats.nl ads (sort of Craigslist)
– Optimizing pictures for image search
Basically, the same as you were doing in other countries 🙂
For the rest, your oppertunities depend on the niche you are working in
Your greatest barrier is the Dutch language itself. It probably takes you 5 times longer to find a good linkpage. Apart from Korean, there isn’t any other language that is so inconsistent and has so many grammatical exceptions, that every ‘Google translated’ article you publish will probably become a joke (no offense, we’re just… complicated people :)). So if you want to do internet marketing in The Netherlands, you probably gonna need some help.