With almost any website, the goal is to increase targeted site traffic and increase sales. SEO services are vital to your search engine marketing success. Search engine marketing or SEM is a process of manipulating how search engines function in order to improve a website’s page ranking when specific keywords and phrases are searched for in the search engine’s search box.
The return on investment (ROI) for SEM is excellent when compared with other online marketing outlets such as PPC or banner ads. With a good SEO and SEM campaign you will see higher conversion rates than you will with other tactics. This means that no matter what your site is about or what country or group of people your site targets you need to have good SEO and SEM.
As the internet has developed and grown globally, English is no longer the only language visible on the web. Many internet users don’t speak English which means that there is a need for multilingual websites. Because things are so culturally driven there is a need to understand that how terms are searched in English is not necessarily how things will be searched in other languages. Don’t forget that if you have a multilingual website you will also need to have multilingual search engine optimization.
SEO campaigns need to be localized for the various markets around the world. The language as well as the culture of the targeted people need to be considered in multilingual websites as well as in multilingual search engine optimization. No matter what country they are in, you want users to find your website when they search your keywords in their native language.
Multilingual SEO goes beyond simple language translation of your website and your keywords. Words and phrases have different meanings and uses in different languages and in different cultures. The translated SEO keywords need to be adapted for specific locations and languages. International keywords should be researched for language translation as well as targeted language for the audience. This will help to ensure that the keywords are those most often used by the audience in their specific language and geographic region.
The final language translation of websites as well as keywords and phrases should be completed by native speakers of the language. This will ensure that the translations are done properly for people in the targeted areas since each language has it’s own intricacies.
Other SEO considerations should include:
- The domain name. You should consider having different domains for different language translations of your website.
- Create links to the translated version of the website. Links are an important part of any SEO campaign. You will want localized links from local domains in the appropriate targeted language.
- Submit to search engines. Yahoo, Google, and Bing are popular English search engines but other languages and countries have other search engines that are widely used. Find out which search engines are popular in the targeted countries and submit and optimize your content for those search engines.
- Site hosting. It is best to have your website hosted in the targeted countries as locally hosted domains will rank higher than non-local domains.
