Localize Your Sitemap. A sitemap is a file usually in XML format that lists the pages of your site. It serves as a map for search engines and other crawlers to learn about the structure of your site, navigate and crawl your site, and index pages which may not be found by crawling. General Availability — Domain name extensions are available to the public and can be secured based on a first-come, first served basis. You may search our website for the original TLDs or any of the new TLDs. The Early Access Period (EAP) — serves as an alternative to priority domain registration for new domains. The obvious benefit of website localization is that your website is easy for consumers to navigate. But why else should you localize your website? Let’s take a look at some of the benefits: Improved SEO Rankings – if you are one of the few businesses who choose to localize, your unique website will be at the top of the SEO rankings.
The very first step to take if you want to rank locally is to make sure that you have local terms in your pages. Ideally, have these terms not just in a Contact Us page but on every page. Some websites need to rank for local search terms but haven’t the slightest hope of doing so.
An example is a rodent-racing website in New York, Big AppleRodent Racing track. The business owner needs to rank well for rodent racing new york, and in fact to rank well for various New York boroughs.
There is one big problem, though. There isn’t a single page on the website with the term rodent racing and the name New York. The only page that contains New York is the Contact Us page, and that page contains only contact information and a map . . . it doesn’t contain the words rodent racing.
Your Sitemap – This is a simple way of showing Google that you’re localizing your site. If you don’t want to use hreflang markups, then you can simply submit the Sitemap in its different languages versions. Whenever you visit a website, your browser and computer will read your site’s DNS records to locate your website files that are stored on a server. Domain name system (DNS) is the friendly naming system for giving address to a website. All domain names must be registered before use. No two similar domain names can exist at the same time.
The problem with putting your location in only your Contact Us page is that while you’ve probably created dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of lovely keyword-rich pages, you have just removed one of the most important keywords and put it on a separate page.
If you want Google to think a page is related to a particular location in addition to finding certain keywords, you need to make sure the location name and keywords appear on the same pages! So, here are a few things you can do:
Include your full address in your Web pages. Include your street, city, state, and ZIP Code. Although you can put the address in the footer, ideally it should be near the top of the page somewhere.
If you have more than one address, put all the addresses on each page.
Include in all your pages the names of all locations you’re interested in. Include a list of city names, for instance, in your footer or in a sidebar, ideally with links to pages with information about each of those cities.
Create a Contact Us page for every location you have. If you have five office locations, you need five Contact Us pages.
Put important keywords on your Contact Us pages.
Find other reasons to mention the city and ZIP Code in the body of your text. If possible, put them in <H> tags; use bold font on some of the references, too.
Include location names in your filenames. Your URL should contain the name of the location for which you are trying to rank well. So, for instance, instead of yourdomain.com/pizza.html, you could use youdomain.com/pizza-phoenix-az.html.
Include the city name in your TITLE and DESCRIPTION meta tags.
Include city and state names in link text when linking from other sites to yours.
You should think carefully about what location names are truly important. Different types of searches use different types of location terms. For instance, when people search for insurance, they often search with a state name: car insurance colorado,renters insurance texas, and so on.
For real estate, people usually search with city names or even neighborhood names. For attorneys, people often search using city names but rarely neighborhood names. So you should think about which terms are important and target those terms.
Getting a few keyworded links to your site with the location names in combination with the product or service keywords can be very powerful. Consider also actually optimizing a few pages for specific locations, using the location and product or service keywords in the <TITLE> and <DESCRIPTION> tags, in H1 headers, several times in the body text, in links to the page, and so on.
The rodent-racing client should probably have a page optimized for New York Rodent Racing, one for Brooklyn Rodent Racing, another for Manhattan Rodent Racing, and so on.
-->Note
The admin center is changing. If your experience doesn't match the details presented here, seeAbout the new Microsoft 365 admin center.
Check the Domains FAQ if you don't find what you're looking for.
Localize Your Site With New Domains Google
To Add, modify or remove domains you must be a Global Administrator of a business or enterprise plan. These changes affect the whole tenant, Customized administrators or regular users won't be able to make these changes.
Follow these steps to add, set up, or continue setting up a domain.
- Go to the admin center at https://admin.microsoft.com.
- Go to the admin center at https://portal.office.de/adminportal.
- Go to the admin center at https://portal.partner.microsoftonline.cn.
Go to the Settings > Domains page.
Select Add domain.
Enter the name of the domain you want to add, then select Next.
Choose how you want to verify that you own the domain.
- If your domain registrar uses Domain Connect, Microsoft will set up your records automatically by having you sign in to your registrar and confirm the connection to Microsoft 365. You'll be returned to the admin center and Microsoft will then automatically verify your domain.
- You can use a TXT record to verify your domain. Select this and select Next to see instructions for how to add this DNS record to your registrar's website. This can take up to 30 minutes to verify after you've added the record.
- You can add a text file to your domain's website. Select and download the .txt file from the setup wizard, then upload the file to your website's top level folder. The path to the file should look similar to:
http://mydomain.com/ms39978200.txt. We'll confirm you own the domain by finding the file on your website.
Choose how you want to make the DNS changes required for Microsoft to use your domain.
- Choose Add the DNS records for me if your registrar supports Domain Connect, and Microsoft will set up your records automatically by having you sign in to your registrar and confirm the connection to Microsoft 365.
- Choose I'll add the DNS records myself if you want to attach only specific Microsoft 365 services to your domain or if you want to skip this for now and do this later. Choose this option if you know exactly what you're doing.
If you chose to add DNS records yourself , select Next and you'll see a page with all the records that you need to add to your registrars website to set up your domain.
If the portal doesn't recognize your registrar, you can follow these general instructions.
Check our list of host-specific instructions to find your host and follow the steps to add all the records you need.
If you don't know the DNS hosting provider or domain registrar for your domain, see Find your domain registrar or DNS hosting provider.
If you want to wait for later, either unselect all the services and click Continue, or in the previous domain connection step choose More Options and select Skip this for now.
Select Finish - you're done!
Add or edit custom DNS records
Follow the steps below to add a custom record for a website or 3rd party service.
Localize Your Site With New Domains Within
Sign in to the Microsoft admin center at https://admin.microsoft.com.
Go to the Settings > Domains page.
On the Domains page, select a domain.
Under DNS settings, select Custom Records; then select New custom record.
Select the type of DNS record you want to add and type the information for the new record.
Select Save.
Localize Your Site With New Domains Using
Registrars with Domain Connect
Domain Connect enabled registrars let you add your domain to Microsoft 365 in a three-step process that takes minutes.
In the wizard, we'll just confirm that you own the domain, and then automatically set up your domain's records, so email comes to Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft 365 services, like Teams, work with your domain.
Note
Localize Your Site With New Domains Must
Make sure you disable any popup blockers in your browser before you start the setup wizard.
Domain Connect registrars integrating with Microsoft 365
- SecureServer or WildWestDomains (GoDaddy resellers using SecureServer DNS hosting)
- Examples:
What happens to my email and website?
After you finish setup, the MX record for your domain is updated to point to Microsoft 365 and all email for your domain will start coming to Microsoft 365. Make sure you've added users and set up mailboxes in Microsoft 365 for everyone who gets email on your domain!
If you have a website that you use with your business, it will keep working where it is. The Domain Connect setup steps don't affect your website.
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