Effective SEO For Multilingual Sites

This is a guest post by Christian Arno. If you want to become a guest blogger, click here to view my guidelines.

As the mother tongue of the internet, English is still the single most widely used language online (according to Internet World Stats), but that position is precarious, with Chinese creeping up on the inside, and nearly three quarters of the world’s internet users searching in a language other than English. Clearly, a multilingual approach is necessary for anyone wishing to truly exploit the world wide aspect of the web.

There are a number of options available for translating your site – from using professional translation services provided by native speakers of your target language (the ideal, if most expensive, choice) through to the simple addition of a translation widget such as Babel Fish or Google Translate. The decisions don’t end there, however, as you must also decide whether to target markets by language alone or to fully localise your sites by geography and culture.

You may consider it sufficient to have, say, a single site in Spanish. An estimated 329 million people speak Spanish as a native language and a single site would at least make your content accessible in Spain (naturally) as well as vast swathes of Latin America. There are, however, linguistic differences between the dialects of Spanish spoken in different countries.  A computer is an ordenador in Spain but a computadora in Latin America for example, while a carro would be a cart in Spain and a car or automobile in Latin America. Similarly, there are linguistic and colloquial differences between the French spoken in France, Belgium and Canada and the English spoken in the UK, the USA and India.

If targeting markets by language alone you should ensure that all your original content is as simple and direct as possible and remove any jokes or specific cultural references that will not necessarily translate. This can make the content a little bland but will help make sure you get your information across. Even if you don’t employ a professional translator, having someone from the target country at least give your content a trial read should help avoid any glaring errors.

Targeting specific countries with the help of native speakers (who ideally will also live in that country, as languages are constantly changing) will, on the other hand, allow you to address these linguistic and cultural differences and make for a more engaging localised website.

Domain and webhost

If resources allow, having a dedicated top level domain for each of your target countries (e.g. www.website.co.uk for the UK and www.website.cn for China) will help to improve your ranking with country-specific search engines. It’s also preferable to have your local sites hosted on servers that are actually based in the target country, however you can now avoid the locality issue by setting the location for your country-specific TLD or subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools.

Backlinks

Link building is as important on your localised sites as anywhere else but, as well as considering the relevance and Alexa ranking of your online associates, you’ll want to also pay attention to their location. Strong links located within your target country will help boost your rankings on Google’s local search engines and any competitors. In practical terms, this might involve posting comments on a Spanish blog related to your content in order to provide links back to your own Spanish site.

Keywords

When researching keywords for foreign markets, don’t forget that Google might not rule that particular roost. Local competitors like Baidu (the most commonly used search engine in China) and Yandex (Russia) might not mean much outside their own markets, but they are the dominant forces within and their search algorithms come with their own quirks.

It’s also important not to rely on direct translations of keywords, whichever search engine you’re focusing on, as colloquialisms, abbreviations or simply alternative terms may be more popular. A literal French translation of ‘car insurance’, for example, would be ‘l’assurance automobile’. Google’s keyword tool reveals that this term yields very few results, with the alternatives ‘assurance auto’ and ‘assurance voiture’ being far more popular.  Essentially, the moral is that if you want to effectively market your website across languages and cultures, you need to tailor your approach specifically to each language and country.

Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of global translation agency and localisation specialists Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 120 employees spanning four continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over thirty million words for businesses in every industry sector and their projected turnover for 2010 is £6.3m. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.

image by: woodleywonderworks

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Tagged as: multilingual, SEO, translation

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