What would be the best way to market a website for SEO targeting many countries?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Collin Davis: If have the resources to work and optimize separate websites, then go for the www.xxxx.au/results/ but if you don't have the resources then
  www.xxxx.com/au/results would be the better approach.
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  Rob Morgan: Thanks Colin. :)
  
  Thats what I was thinking. Basically the site is a huge directory search like www.autotrader.co.uk but with stock all over the world, with different exotic/supercar dealers feeding in.
  
  I don't see a duplicate content issue here, as all the content and stock will be unique per country. However,  ;I am still working on how much extra resources are required here...With link building and content development being the main SEO plan, surely the main resource issue will be the creation of the separate domains (.com, .com.au, .nz etc)....basically more and IT resource issue than SEO?
  
  what do you think?
  
  thanks
  Rob
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  Martino Mosna: I'd go with ;www.xxxx.com/au/results solution, but I'd take great care in planning a good rel hreflang mapping between local versions of the webpages.
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  Rob Morgan: Thanks Martino, ;
  
  Are you meaning something like
  
  <link rel=”alternate” href=”http://xxxx.com/en-au” hreflang=”en-au” />
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  Martino Mosna: +Rob Morgan ;exactly. It's the officially supported way of doing localization within a same-language multi-country website.
  
  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
  
  Moreover, there are some very good case studies that shows how a correct hreflang tagging does really boost indexing speed and URL discovery: ;http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/case-study-the-impact-of-hreflang-tag
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  Simon Fryer: +Martino Mosna is on the money. Go with a subfolder and plan your hreflang's carefully. You should also use geo-targeting in webmaster tools to target specific the subfolder for each location.
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  Rob Morgan: Thanks guys -  ;+Martino Mosna ;+Simon Fryer ;
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  Luca Scaggion: If you have a large enough budget, the textual contents should be entrusted to someone who lives in Australia. In every English-spoken country the language is different and so the queries you're interested in may change. Also, you should use sitemaps to provide Google with rel="alternate" hreflang="x" as well so Google can immediately notice your directions, instead of waiting that Googlebot scans all the resources including the rel hreflang in header.
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  Rob Morgan: +Luca Scaggion ; - with rel="alternate" hreflang="x" should this go in the header of each and every page of the website to say that although the pages are for different countries (such as .es, .com.sa etc) they are all english - hence the use of "x"?? ;
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  Luca Scaggion: +Rob Morgan ;Yes correct.
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  Collin Davis: +Rob Morgan as you said its more of an IT and resources issue. If you have the resources, then its best to go with a country level domain approach. A cctld always has better chances of ranking because it is a very strong signal to search engines that you want to rank in that country. So it makes ranking for key terms in that particular region easier.
  
  Both techniques have their pros and cons and you need to consider more than SEO aspects to come up with such a decision.
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  Results SEO: Useful Post.