Which one works the best for the customer as well as search engines?

Thanks

Interesting article. I’m about to do an experiment with a company in the UK. They want to attract foreign visitors to travel to the business in the UK. Which would you say is the best method to do this? Translate a landing page in their current website ( with a foreign page titles etc…) or create a new site with a foreign domain name?

Of course, we can all look at comparative search volumes for specific keywords using Google Insights, but, as is clear in English, search volumes don’t automatically mean the “right” visitors.

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.

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.

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.