Multilingual SEO for global success Part 1

Multilingual keyword research to reach markets beyond Canada

So you've translated your website into French...and German, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic and Chinese. Now what?

The next step is tell your multilingual customers about your newly translated websites. There are many ways to find those customers, but the search engines are just as important in French and Spanish as they are in English.

Surprisingly, SEO in French, Spanish...or any Roman alphabet language is not that different from SEO in English. In this article, we will be dealing only with Roman alphabet languages.

The main skill you need 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 you make for your multilingual SEO efforts.

Let's assume the original site is in English, the translation into French to reach the rest of Canada, 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 "shoes" (find shoes, find shoes online, find glow-in-the-dark shoes online, etc.), you will most likely end up with twice as many search terms in French, as there are two common words for shoes in French ("souliers" and "chaussures"). This might mean that you need to create additional landing pages for French Canadian 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 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. But please, don't use them for actual translation; they will butcher the language and embarrass you with your multilingual audiences.

The next step 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 my second multilingual SEO article, we will look at the on-page optimization.

For more free seo-related articles for reprint, please see our free reprint article directory.

Canada's best search engine marketing firm, offering Canadian SEM specialists, effective and professional SEO consultants, ethical SEO experts, multilingual SEO marketing consultants and freelance writers.
Serving Canada and the world from Stormont-Dundas County: Chesterville, Winchester, Morrisburg and Cornwall, Ontario, between Ottawa, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE MARKETING STRATEGIES FROM AN EFFECTIVE AND MULTILINGUAL CANADIAN SEO CONSULTANT

Home | Contact | About | Site Map | Pricing | Testimonials | Terms | Privacy | SEO Services (International) | Canadian Social Bookmarking