Friday, February 3, 2006 Making Foreign Language SEO Work for You So you have localized your website into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. Your translation company provided you with flawless translations, your development team went the extra mile to adjust the content management system to work multilingually, your QA people have tested all the languages rigorously.  So will the hits a la Français start poring in? Perhaps, but this article will suggest some ways to boost your Internet presence in the non-English speaking markets. The following is a checklist of useful things to consider. Some of them may apply to you. Before you start translating your web content, have your translators consider the main keywords you are targeting in each web page. The same principles that guide you in writing the English content should be used when writing the foreign language versions. Have your translators use the keywords frequently within the content, just as you have done in the English version. If you have already translated the content, consider a rewrite if the keywords are not used adequately. Translate the meta tags, alt tags, title, description, mouseovers, footers and other non-visible texts. Consider the keyword and meta tag translations carefully. Check the competitive websites in the foreign countries, using the foreign language search engines, and check the keywords your competitors are using. This should give you a good idea on how to translate the keywords and meta tags. Consider the web page names you are going to use in the foreign language pages. Use the main keyword if possible in the page name (e.g., if your site is www.acme.com/diamonds.asp, try to use www.acme.com/diamenten.asp in your German language page). Consider registering your foreign language site as a country-specific domain (e.g., .de for German, .fr from France). While this is not a key issue for SEO in itself, there are some industry directories on the Internet that only list local websites; getting a country-specific domain may qualify your website for these directories. Also consider that some people in foreign countries may be more comfortable in dealing with someone that they perceive to be in their own neighborhood. Research and determine which are the key search engines in each country. All major search engines, e.g., Yahoo and Google, have language- and country-specific search engines (e.g., http://www.google.de, http://www.yahoo.fr). In addition, each country has local search engines, and some of them may be immensely popular. Register your website with these country-specific search engines. If you don't have a person that speaks the relevant language, get someone to register for you. Consider the for-pay engines as well, such as Yahoo. Although you may need a local credit card to pay in each country. Apply to be listed in industry-specific directories. Perform searches for your keywords in the country-specific search engines and look for these directories. Reciprocal and one-way links. Start working to get inbound links for each of your website language versions. Find out where your high-ranking competition are getting their inbound links. Use the Google command 'link:www.website.com' or you can also find some good, free tools to find the inbound links to your competitor's sites (e.g., http://www.linkpopularity.com). Traffic is guaranteed to start rolling in if you follow these suggestions. Now what to do with the traffic? That will be the topic of a future article on Global Translations weblog. 8:15:21 AM    comment [] © Copyright 2007 Global Translations.

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