How should I optmize multi-lingual website?

Hello folks,

I'm a new member from Brazil and starting studying SEO. I have a multi-lingual website (English, Portuguese and Spanish). I have automatic IP detection so if a customer from USA access it it will open in English, from Brazil in Portuguese, from Spain, spanish ...

The domain is .com and I also have .com.br (Brazil).

My main market is Brazil but my products (images) ca be lincesed everywhere in the world.

Question 1: Should I optimize my homepage from the .com domain (main one) in Portguese (Brazil) or english?

Question 2: Since I have .com.br domain as well, should I optimize .com using all English keywords and the .com.br using all Portuguese (Brazil) keywords and then submitt my website to the various directories?

Your help/guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

I would optimise the .com in english and spanish and the .com.br in portuguese. You could also through on a portuguese section onto the .com site and try to rank from your brazilian search terms as well so you own at least two of the top ten positions, however to do this make sure the content on both sites is different.

If possible I would also put the .com.br on a server based in Brazil and point some .com.br links at it.

Squelsh,

Amazing feedback, I really suspected I should optimize both URL's in separate. Now that my .com is already ranking in Google for Brazilian Keywords, can I reverse it back to English? If so, I'd concentrate to optimize .com in English and Spanish as suggested and .com.br for Brazilian Portuguese keywords.

Is the automatic IP detection play any role on this?

Thanks again mate, much appreciated!

Thanks Squelsh, much appreciated your tip!

Are you using wordpress or a custom made website?

I'm actually having the same problems building up an english/portuguese website, although I only have one domain for it.

Cheers