So you've translated
your website into German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, French,
Arabic, Portuguese and Chinese. Now what?
Now you have to draw traffic
to the newly translated sites. There are many ways to
draw traffic, but the search engines are just as important
in German or Spanish as they are in English.
Surprisingly, SEO in Spanish,
French, English, German...or any Roman alphabet language
is not that different. In this article, we will be dealing
only with Roman alphabet languages.
The main thing is to be able
to move around in the language...and if you are not
fluent, make sure a translator cleans up any text edits
without undoing the changes key to your multilingual
SEO efforts.
Let's assume the original
site is in English, the translation into French, for
example, is already complete and you have a list of
English search terms (keywords).
The first step is to identify
equivalent French search terms. This might not give
you the same number of search terms. For instance, if
you start with the 10 search terms around the word "socks"
(buy socks, buy socks online, glow-in-the-dark socks,
etc.), you will most likely end up with twice as many
search terms in French, as there are two common words
for socks in French ("bas" and "chaussettes"). This
might mean that you need to create additional landing
pages for French search engine surfers.
Note: be wary of using official
translations for keyword research. Your translator probably
used the very best vocabulary and grammar possible,
including words and conjugations that your target market
might never even have heard of, let alone be searching
for.
You can get ideas through
free translation services - which absolutely butcher
the language, so don't use them for translation, please!
- that can give you some quick ideas to work with. Two
such services I use for just such a purpose are FreeTranslation.com and FreeTranslation.Paralink.com.
The next step, of course,
is to find out which of the search terms are worth pursuing.
Of course, you could try all of them, since it will
take almost no effort to get top rankings for little
searched French or Spanish terms. But you might also
miss out on some related terms that are well-searched.
Two pay-per- click search engines that offer search
suggestion tools in a variety of languages are Overture
and Miva (formerly Espotting).
The third step is to group
the search terms together into natural groupings and
assign each group to a page on the website, just as
one would do in English, so that the terms that complement
each other are grouped onto the same web page.
You see, it's really not
that different from English, but you do have to be able
to move through the other language. Please note: fluency
is not required, but being able to understand what you
read and come up with related search terms is required.
In
part 2, we will look at the on-page optimization.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR: David Leonhardt is a multilingual SEO marketing consultant who offers French language
SEO marketing services. Pick up a copy of his SEO strategies e-book. |
