According to Google, the majority of users surveyed felt that having information and a Web site in their own language was an even more important buying factor than price.
There are many things to consider when deciding if you should take the plunge into a global Web site and the international SEO efforts that go along with it. The decision really depends on the purpose of your Web site, the available market for your products and services, and any factors which are specific to your business model.
Once you have decided to move forward with a multi-language and multi-national targeted site, you're going to have some work cut out for you. And if you don't do it right, you'd be better off not doing it at all.
One of the first considerations is whether you are going to have a multi-lingual Web site or if you are going to create separate Web sites on separate domains targeted at different countries. If your budget will allow, both would be best.
When creating a multi-language site, there are couple ways you can do it. You can allow visitors who arrive at your main site to choose from either a drop down menu, or have a row of flags representing the different languages in which your site is available (these are pretty much the accepted norm for language choice on a multi-language page). This enables you to market to people in different languages; it does not however, enable you to automatically rank well or at all in those additional language search engines nor target that market most effectively. The above method can be applied to a single site with subdirectories for different languages, such as: www.websites.com/en/ for english or www.website.com/esp/ for spanish or it can lead to different domains, which we talk about next.
As mentioned having separate Web sites to target a market with a foreign language, is improtant. First you need to conduct native language keyword research. The good news is that each search engine provides you with its own keyword research tools tailored for that language. This means that you're undoubtedly better off using the data analysis tools of the search engine you're trying to rank well in. Next register a TLD (top level domain: .com, .co.uk, .de, etc.) specific to that languages country, i.e. instead of www.website.com you have www.website.ph for the Philippines, or www.Internetprasenz.de for Germany (Desutschland). Finally, you'll want to host your site in that country or have a server co-located there if possible. Having this domain and geo-located hosting tells the search engines you are focused on a specifc country or language from the ground up, gives them a clear indicator of which index you want to rank in.
Next it's time to get to work on your content. You can most certainly use the keyword research you've done in your native language, and then carry that over to the foreign language. However, when targeting languages or locales other than the US and English, it's important to take the nuances of the other languages into careful consideration. Translating content into another language is tricky business and you need to be very careful. Here's a quick checklist of things to consider when translating your content:
* Make certain that your content is translated such that it conveys the same meaning and gives the same perception in the foreign culture.
* Check that images which convey one message in the USA do not convey or have negative connotations in your targeted language.
* Be sure that all of the terms you use don't have negative meanings in foreign languages or their slang.
It's very easy to have a nice site or campaign uprooted by a single word or image that has negative meanings, unbeknownst to you, in the targeted language.
Use real people to do your translation and avoid mechanical translators for a more fluid, real feel to the grammar, etc. This will help you to avoid any disasters due to improper translation or different perceptions or meanings. There are a lot of words that will not translate correctly or their direct translation does not work in context and can even be offensive for the native language speakers. There is nothing worse than a poorly translated site. It's not only completely unnatural to read, but also shoves your site's bounce rate through the roof.
Regardless of how you translate your site's content, we highly recommend that you find at least one native speaker of the language you've targeted. Ideally they will also be familiar with the culture as well. Then work with this person on a consulting basis to read through your content and edit it to make sense for the country and region. This last step is easily what separates the successful sites from the ones that never seem to get off the ground.
Is Google a big Fish in a little pond?! Welcome to International SEO...
We spend a lot of time and plenty of space within SearchEngineNews.com telling you exactly how Google works and that's great - if you live in the US. Believe it or not, Google, the search engine superpower isn't the dominant search engine in every country.
Let's start with the Chinese Google killer, Baidu that has 53% of the searches versus Google China's 33%. The most valid theory on why Baidu is dominating China is that statistics show 55% of Baidu's users are looking for MP3s. This is because Baidu is less strict on its legal standards than Western search engines and is far better for illegal downloading.
Another reason Google is not the king of search globally is because they are not completely optimized for the alphabet and language of other countries the way they are in the US. For instance, the Russian search engine Yandex beats out Google.ru with a 64% market share. This can mostly be contributed to the fact that it's built around the Cyrillic alphabet and recognizes Russian grammar and inflection while Google.ru still falls short.
We can continue to name countries along with their leading search engines. The point here is that it only makes sense that if you have a Chinese site, you would want to concentrate most of your SEO efforts on Baidu, and so forth. This means along with keyword research you'll need to do some good old fashion SEO research to find the top search engines that dominate the country of your choice.
Once you've found them, you'll need to find out what the top ranking factors are so that you can apply them to your sites. Unfortunately, this article is not going to go deep into how you change your SEO strategy to target the leading search engine for your country of choice. There are too many to name and too much research to lay out for everyone to pick through. The important thing to take away from this is that they all have some key differences and yet the basics remain the same.
As an example, Baidu doesn't put much weight into inbound links. This means you'd totally be wasting your time if you focused on link building for a Chinese based Web site. After a touch of research you'd quickly discover that you'd be way better off increasing your Baidu PPC advertising budget. This is because the general rule with Baidu is that higher rankings are directly related with bigger PPC spending.
Although it can seem like a daunting task when it's laid out, you just have to remain patient and take things step by step when going global. Just be sure to put it into perspective and remember that you climb a mountain one step at a time. When you're ready to go global careful planning and implementing can lead to big rewards.
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