Multilingual seo basics by ericwelke

Articles from EricWelke.com Multilingual SEO Basics by Eric Welke

What are the benefits of Multilingual SEO? There is a huge untapped market in countries outside of predominantly English speaking countries. They present a very lucrative opportunity to online vendors, marketers and content creators. Cross border drop shipping and even international packages make it easier to deliver goods to other countries. The potential earnings are even higher for digital content like e-books, music & videos, online services and software sales. If you deal with products and services that don’t need to be shipped then you’re missing a potential revenue stream by not localizing your product for foreign markets. A few things you’ll need to consider depending on your Multilingual SEO goal: If you’re optimizing your non-English language content for English search engines: -

Make sure your tags and headers are in the language that you want to use

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Follow the same SEO guidelines for optimization and duplicate content

If you’re optimizing your English language content for Non-English search engines: -

You’ll need at least 1 page that’s completely in the target language

You’ll need to submit your page to the most popular search engines for the target language Google has a huge chunk of the English language searches but other countries have their own favorites – Baidu in China for example.

Start with Keyword research All basic SEO campaigns start with keyword research, even multilingual ones. However, you’ll need to take into context how those words are actually used in the target language. Some words when translated literally to the target language may not actually get you the type of traffic you are aiming for. Choose a selection of the translated words that you want to use and research how they could be used by a person who speaks that language. An example would be “dog beds” which is “cama del perro” in Spanish. “Cam del perro” yields around 27,000 global monthly searches on Google’s keyword tools. Local search is only 320 though, and that is not enough usage to make it productive. Adding in a location keyword to make it a long-tail search only further reduces the number. You will need to repeat this for all the keywords you’ve translated and want to use. What works for English language searches doesn’t immediately translate to another language. This is even more apparent when you start using non-western languages. Follow Content Optimization Rules Do the same steps as you would for English content optimization. Tags, headers, keyword density should all follow the same rules. Maintain one language for each page to avoid confusing the crawlers. Your URL should also use the correct country domain. This helps get your site indexed by the location appropriate search engines. You still have to submit your site to them to make sure you do get indexed. It would also be a huge plus if you are familiar with the target language. If not, you might need to hire someone who is fluent in the language to make sure your content is written properly and fit for human consumption.

With the current emphasis on quality content your multilingual SEO strategy must

be focused on bringing the best content for your user. To put it simply, if English content poorly written will turn off English speaking users, so will content poorly written in the target language turn off that languageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s speakers.