SEO in "hostile" foreign markets

[Unknown Webmaster]

I have found a foreign market with reasonable low competition, and I have launched a site that currently has somewhere between 50 and 75 pages of good content on it (written by a native poker player), and I update it several times a week.

Everything seemed to be going well, until I realized that I simply won't be getting any good or mediocre links from other gaming sites.

Most of the gaming sites in that language seems to be owned by the same people, and after sending a couple of e-mails and talking to a friend, it seems like they only link to their own sites no matter what you offer them.

There are a couple of other sites, however, it is basically bloggers who blog once a month and don't read their email, so the links probably won't be worth that much.

I'm somewhat at a loss for ideas as to how to approach this situation, and would really appreciate some advice.

I do need links, right?

[pokermonger]

Depending on how competitive the market is, you might not need very many links. I would start with country specific directories.

[Randy Ray]

You can always have a subdirectory of the site where you translate the content into another language, and get links to that section. PageRank flows through the site as you link to the other pages from your own site.

[MJ]

Or, start other sites in that market and start linking to yourself Play that game long enough and make your sites quality and they'll be coming to you, instead of the other way around....

Good luck.

[Mr-AJ]

Or, start other sites in that market and start linking to yourself Play that game long enough and make your sites quality and they'll be coming to you, instead of the other way around....

Good luck.

Yep, that's my tip too.
I guess it's easy for your native speaking friend to start a simple poker blog. Then you can add very nice in content links

[Michael Martinez]

Depending on the search engine you're optimizing for, links from your American link network will pass value to a foreign domain. It's not as efficient as native-language linking but may be less convoluted for you.

[Unknown Webmaster]

Thanks a lot for all the advice.

I think I'm going to benefit very much from this in the months to come, especially the part about translating the site. It had never occurred to me to put english articles on my foreign website, but it makes things so much easier.