Creating SEO-optimized content for multilingual websites present a whole new challenge for SEO. Needing a multilingual site is a good problem to have. It usually means that you have customers in multiple countries. However, it also means you have to double or triple your SEO efforts.
The good news is that optimizing your foreign-language web site is very much the same as optimizing your English one. You just do it in a different language. Here are some guidelines that should serve as reminders of what you should plan to do during the SEO process:
- Translate keywords into the new language. In some cases, you won’t be able to translate your keywords into a matching word in another language. In that case, you’ll need to choose new keywords. As in SEO for your English site, be careful to avoid keyword stuffing.
- Translate existing web content. Again, translations can sometimes be squirrelly. Unless you’re an expert in the language to which you’re translating, hire someone to do it for you. A bad translation could cost you more in lost traffic than the services of a good translator.
- Apply all of the same SEO rules to your foreign content that you’ve learned for your English content. Just because the language is different doesn’t mean that the search engine or the search engine crawler is any different.
- Include the proper links both to and from your English site to your foreign-language site, but also include the appropriate links to English on the foreign-language site.
- Make language options clearly available on your web site. If these options are not clearly marked, your foreign visitors could miss them, and then you’ll lose visitors before they’re fully engaged in your site.
SEO is really no different in any other language than it is in English. The biggest concern when translating your site to another language is the actual translation. The SEO efforts are essentially the same, but getting the language wrong could cost you just as much as not having a foreign language site at all.
Guest post by Andy MacDonald of the Blogging & Marketing Tips for Webmasters Blog.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Having multi-language sites isn’t worth the effort becuase 95% of the world online goes for english. Is there any point to bother to get traffic from other languaged people?
What if you are trying to sell to people who don’t speak English?
I hope you’re joking Justin…
Baidu was recently found to take 5.2% of the worldwide queries (3.4billion) each month - in Chinese. Russia has 21 million internet users. There are huge Spanish regions of the internet.
Whenever I find someone putting forward your viewpoint Justin, it turns out they only actually speak English themselves. Of course then, the internet looks to be 95% English. If you spoke another language you could explore that region of the net and get a very different perspective.
The point of dealing with all these countries? If you’re just dealing with English you are ignoring a huge marketplace. These countries have a lot of money to spend and having a local presence enables your company to access to those markets. There are plenty of American businessmen learning Chinese for exactly this reason.
Nice to see you really reaching out to the millions of non-English speaking customers across the world there, Justin
Even if they have some understanding of English, most people want to use websites in their own language. It would be extremely disrespectful for multi-national companies to expect to operate in foreign countries without making any provisions for the local language or culture.
Plus I don’t think saying it progressively louder and slower until they understand works on the web.
Justin i think you are wrong. I agree with Nick, in that although most of the web is in English, there are still billions of people out there that doesn’t know English, and people who are not reaching out to that sector of the market are fools!!!
SEO in french is not so easy as it is in english for the same product or service. You should consider market property and behavior clients. Many companies have to propose multi languages sites, and Search engine Optimizer need to deal with. Fortunately, it’s more work for them!
Hi,
Justin, it seems that you are in the wrong blog. Just in China there are more than 210 million internet users, that is almost 70% of the US population.
English internet users are just 30% of all the international community, and the rest of the 70% ? what languages do you think they speak? take a look at this web page and see a very interesting statistics.
http://www.internetworldstats.com
To complement this post, I’d like to say something. Translating a web page is not enough, for example, in Spanish, not all the words have the same meaning in Argentina, Mexico or Spain. So even in the same language could make some variations of the words. I know that A car is a car, but jargon matters.
I am just now starting an SEO campaign for Spanish keywords - anxious to see how that effects pagerank, traffic, etc.
Glad to see xenophobia on the web is being supressed!