Oct 05 2010

Multilingual Websites and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)


Things to consider

The internet has truly opened the doors to international trade, allowing us to reach a global audience like never before. English is often cited as the language of the internet. However, consider this: 75% of the world’s population do not speak English.

A multilingual approach is therefore important if your company is targeting international clients and consumers. But equally important is optimising your site so that it is search engine friendly. Below is a list of things to consider
if you have translated or want to translate your site.

Countries where English is the official or primary language:

Country specific domains

Country specific domains, e.g. www.mywebsite.co.uk and www.mywebsite.fr help improve your local search rankings. Downsides are that they are expensive and difficult and time consuming to maintain. Go for specific domains if resources allow.

Subdomains & subfolders

Only one domain. You can place multilingual content within this. So, for example www.mywebsite.com/fr for French content and www.mywebsite.com/en for English content, etc. Benefits are it is much easier and less expensive to maintain than country specific domains and can create an impression that your products or services are far reaching and therefore successful.

Keywords

Do not directly translate keywords. Users in different locations may type different things
when searching for the same products/services.

Key tip: carry out local keyword research!

One page, one language

Do not put two different languages side by side on the same page. This confuses the search engine spiders which does not go down well. It may also confuse your readers.

Automated machine translations

Automated machine translations offer a cheap way of creating multilingual websites. However, beware: due to its low quality, Google can view machine translated content as spam and may penalise the website in its rankings. If you do use automated translations, ensure the relevant pages are not indexed by search engines.

This is a guest post from Raihan Ahmed of TransABC Translation Services, a global translation agency providing assistance in all the major world languages.

7 Responses to “Multilingual Websites and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)”

  1. Geno Prussakov says:
    October 5, 2010 at 3:47 pm

    Great post, Raihan; and glad you’ve touched on the topic of machine translations. I didn’t know “Google can view machine translated content as spam and may penalise the website in its rankings” but as a professional linguist I am happy to hear this. A simple test of cutting a text from any website and translating it, say, with Yahoo’s Babel Fish; and then taking the target “translation” you arrive at and pasting it into GoogleTranslate, and translating it back into the source language will show how terrible these things are. If you care about your brand/business, never (I mean, NEVER!) use machine translations (neither for your website, nor for your paid search ads… forget about these things).

  2. Emilio Espinoza Jr says:
    October 5, 2010 at 8:51 pm

    Great post! Raihan!
    The problem with those machine translated devices or even the devices you touched upon do not really provide you with the right translation. I have used these at times especially the Google translator tool and did not quite got the translation I wanted. I am a bilingual SEO analyst, my primary language is Spanish, every time I do a search for a Spanish term it is very specific. When dealing with a multilingual website, the best way to approach any translation is to actually consult or hire someone native to the targeted language. Another thing to take into consideration is that every keyword you wish to target in a foreign language may not mean the same, for example Chevy at one time introduced a new vehicle the “Chevy Nova”, well the term “nova” literally mean “it does not go” that is why this car was not a success in Mexico. So most importantly, translate carefully and if you are able to get a native speaker of where you are targeting even better.

  3. Jon says:
    October 6, 2010 at 9:24 am

    Any alternatives to “Country specific domains”? Are .com’s just as good? What about hosting? Do you need a foreign hoster?

  4. Indramanidas (Indramani Das) says:
    October 6, 2010 at 11:47 am

    http://dailyseotip.com/multilingual-websites-and-search-engine-optimisation-seo/1106/

  5. Nraju says:
    October 13, 2010 at 9:43 am

    Dear Sir,

    If we place the different content (not exactly same one) in the domains of Australia and USA (using the ccTLDs domains like domainname.com.au, domainname.us).

    Will it be sufficient if we use one BLOG for all the domains to write articles/blogs as per SEO or do we need to create a blog for each domain?

    Thanks,
    Nagaraju.

  6. Carolina says:
    November 22, 2010 at 9:34 am

    Thanks for the article. I’m wondering wow effective is adding relevant foreign keywords in meta keywords / title / description to an ENGLISH page?

  7. Raihan ahmed says:
    January 17, 2011 at 12:27 am

    Carolina,

    I don’t think it would be too effective just adding relevant foreign keywords in the meta tags to an English language page. The reason I say this is that one of the things search engines do when giving weight to keywords is they analyze keyword density. In other words, how many times does a particular keyword show up on your site. Keyword density includes on page, i.e. what the user can physically see and not just the meta tags.

    It may not be helpful therefore if search engines see particular keywords in the meta tags but then cannot find these words on page. They may conclude that the meta keywords are actually not that relevant.

    Your best option would be to create multilingual websites and get good keyword density for your relevant foreign keywords.