Multilingual SEO

Keyword research

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 search engine optimization 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 Free Translation and Free Translation Paralink.

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.

On-page optimisation

Actually, the on-page optimization is easy. Just place your search terms in all the right places. Of course, it is not quite that simple.

For instance, German nouns like to merge into incredible conglomerates. An example of where I ran into this was at this Netzwerküberwachung site. Two major search terms were Netzwerküberwachung and Netzwerk überwachung. The first, conglomerate word is actually correct, but people search in funny ways, and the search engines don't generally recognize partial words. In English, a reference to "website monitoring service" would count as a reference for the search term "website monitoring". But the German equivalent, Überwachungsservice für Webseiten, would read literally in English as "monitoringservice for websites".

In other words, you might have to make the translator dance some fancy language steps to deliver a readable message that does not interfere with your search terms.

Multilingual SEO also brings the question of accents. Use them. One well-respected SEO questioned the use of accents when it turned out that more people searched for Montreal than Montréal. Don't you believe it for a second. There simply were more English people searching without the accent, so leave the accents off your English site but keep them on your French, German, Italian or other sites.

There is one exception to the accents rule: if your market is very, um, shall we say "downscale". I think you know what I mean. There is a certain market in English that refuses to capitalize words or use punctuation. The equivalent market in German is unlikely to use an umlaut - you might have to optimize both with and without the accent.

What about file names. Many companies keep the same filenames when they create a translated site. So http://www.rgb.com/en/Products/AudioVisual.asp becomes http://www.rgb.com/de/Products/AudioVisual.asp , a mouthful in any language, but of no SEO help in the German version. On the other hand, keeping the same file name helps the webmaster keep track of what all these otherwise "unintelligible" filenames are all about, without resorting to a wall covered in file name translation tables. This is not a simple decision to make.

One question that often comes up is where to house the translated site on a separate site, in a sub-domain or in a directory on the English site.

The general consensus is that it is preferable to give it its own domain with the appropriate country extension...which is easy for German or Italian, but which country do you choose for Spanish? Spain? Mexico? Argentina? The USA? And have you ever tried to apply for a .fr domain?

Second best is a sub-domain, which at least carries a semblance of being a separate site and allows some directories to consider it a home page for listing purposes (and you want those directory links).

Which brings me to my final point. Don't forget to build the links that are so important in SEO. Good quality links. Relevant links, both in terms of topics and in terms of the search terms in the language of the site. There are fewer avenues to build links in French or Dutch than in English. Fortunately, you will need fewer links to get good French or Dutch search engine rankings.

Thinking about expanding your market into Europe, Latin America or the rest of Canada? Get your site translated and get it optimized for the multilingual search engine listings.