Search Engine Positioning Strategies - Online learningJER Group, Inc - An Online Learning Centerthewebpoint - Search engine positioning courses

Search Engine Positioning Strategies for the Swedish Market

Search engine positioning is an important and effective (and cheap) marketing method in Sweden, the European country with the largest number of citizens using the Internet.

Easy to get good search engine rankings

Three factors that facilitate top positions:

  • relatively small size of the Swedish market
  • limited active search engine positioning
  • a limited number of major search engines that have a Swedish version

Sweden a testing ground for new products

Sweden has for many years been a testing ground for new products, clothes, music, electronics, marketing campaigns etc. Many international companies first test their products or marketing concepts on the Swedish market, if it works here it usually works on international markets. This could also apply to products or marketing concepts launched via the Internet. Search engine positioning is often used in these type of campaigns.

Search engines and portals

Positioning strategies in Swedish can be limited to a few large actors:
Search engines like Altavista, Evreka (using alltheweb.com), Msn, Lycos, punkt.se all have versions in Swedish.
The directory Yahoo also has it's Swedish version.
The main portals are Passagen (using Evreka), Torget (using Msn) and Spray (using punkt.se but since Spray has merged with Lycos a change is expected).

Keywords and the Swedish letters å, ä, ö

One word "phrases" when searching is common in Sweden and should definitely be considered when choosing keywords.
In a normal Swedish text the letters å,ä,ö will be fairly common, the problem is that many Swedes will change the letter å to a, ä to a and ö to o when doing a search through an international search engine (i.e. the word "sökmotor" (search engine) could be "sokmotor"). The best bet is to optimize for the correctly spelled words with å,ä,ö and to be aware of the problem.

Keywords and the domain name

The top domain .se can only be used if you have a company registered in Sweden. This will prohibit most foregin companies from using keywords in the domain name. The solution is to use the top domain .nu ("now" in Swedish). This is currently used by a large number of companies for promotional or campaign sites on the Swedish market. See www.nunames.nu

The WebPoint - Experience counts

The WebPoint is a Swedish company with several years practical experience in search engine marketing and positioning. Göran Sandwall, founder and owner, is pleased to be able to share hard gained knowledge with students from the JER Group search engine positioning classes. Göran will personally be facilitating the 6 week search engine workshop and the self-paced tutorial in Swedish or English.

The WebPoint offers not only search engine positioning service and web design but has a whole range of Internet marketing services aimed for small and medium sized Swedish companies. Web hosting, quality control, competitor watch are a few other services offered. The company also owns several .com addresses and develops Internet marketing products like LinkButton - Helping you link, LinkAnalyzer - A competitive link edge (coming soon).

Some recommended Internet marketing resources

ClickZ Today - Articles on every aspect of Internet marketing.

Workz.com - The ultimate resource site for small businesses. Interesting newsletters and "how to" manuals.

Internetday - Daily newsletter covering different Internet marketing techniques.

Marketing Resources - Interesting newsletters and other resources.