Multilingual Online Marketing and SEO

Multilingual Online Marketing & SEO

Multilingual Online Marketing & SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective marketing tools available to businesses in the 21st century. From PPC and AdWords, to on-page optimisation and link-building, the case for SEO is really quite an easy one: if you rank highly on Google for certain key terms, your business is far more likely to succeed than if you don’t.

This is a given. But with international markets, the waters are even muddier. A whole host of cultural and linguistic intricacies must be considered when setting up a foreign language website and to ignore this, is to embark on a rather counterproductive online marketing campaign. It’s important that you speak to your target audience in a language that they not only understand, but in a natural way that resonates with them. There’s little point in having a professionally designed website, if the content lets it down.

So how does a business broaden its online presence in foreign lands? Well, before the SEO process begins, you’ll obviously need to have a foreign language website in the target market.

But before you do this, you must identify which is the best market to target, and this will vary greatly from business to business. You will have to do your research and see where there is a gap for you to exploit. If there are other similar businesses operating already in a specific country, then that’s a good sign as it demonstrates a demand for the product or service. However, be wary of too many companies, as it can be difficult to gain a foothold in an industry that is already saturated.

The next stage is to buy a locally hosted domain name in the target country. It may just be your company name with a local domain extension, for example .es in Spain or .fr in France, or if your company name is a direct reflection of the services you offer (e.g. ‘Web Design Services’), then you would be best translating your company name into the target language and buying that domain name instead. Just as important is your choice of web host as the server they use should be located in the target country – Google considers the IP address of the server in its ranking algorithms.

This lays the foundation for you to translate your website into the desired language. From a content standpoint, you must use a translation company that uses professionally qualified ‘in-country’ translators that translate INTO their native tongue.

Some businesses may be tempted by the many free website translation tools available online – whilst these can be useful if you need to understand the gist of a website in another language, you really don’t want to use such a tool for your own website, as they provide translations that are far from perfect.

It also pays to be wary of the linguistic nuances between dialects. For example, the French spoken in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada are substantially the same, but there are some key differences. There is no room for complacency with your foreign language website, e.g. courriel is ‘email’ in Canadian French but simply ‘email’ in France. And dejeuner is ‘lunch’ in France, but ‘breakfast’ in Belgium and Switzerland.

Localisation and SEO go hand-in-hand. You want professionally written, localised content – this means you musn’t translate your keywords from English. The correct dictionary translation of a keyword or phrase may NOT be what people use to search for the desired product or service locally, they may use colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing. So in the same way as you identify your industry’s highest ranking keywords for the English market, such as via Google’s free keyword finder, you have to research the keywords for each target country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimized.

Once you have your keywords identified for each country, you can then incorporate these into a professionally translated website.

This is just the very basics of launching a foreign language website. The importance of localizing the website for the target market can’t be over-emphasized and there is a myriad of cultural and linguistic complexities that must be addressed in addition to the above – but that would make for an essay in itself!

About the author
Christian Arno is founder and Managing Director of Lingo24, a global translation services provider that specializes in website localization. With operations across four continents and clients in over sixty countries, Lingo24 are on course for a turnover of £3.7m in 2009.

You can comment on this article at Temi’s blog or you can discuss it at UK Webmaster SEO forum

Yes, you can use LinkedIn and other social media for SEO

Using LinkedIn for SEO

You know that owning a website is only half the job done. The website needs to draw a lot of traffic towards it, which is only possible through search engine optimisation. Sites that can be accessed or crawled by the search engines easily and to the maximum are visible to more number of eyeballs and it is therefore in your interest to seek better tips and ways to make the site worthy of attention from the search engines. This will in turn lead to more traffic visiting the website and you can take full advantage of such visibility as you go along.

You may have made use of many of the popular social networking sites to improve the visibility of your website, but may still be unsure about their impact. One site that can be of great use to you is LinkedIn. This site already enjoys great visibility and its ranking on the search engines is quite high. This will ensure that any association with this site would be of great benefit to your website as well. It is the spin off effect that will do the trick.

If you have already established contact and have a running association with this site, then it is time to make substantial improvements on the SEO front and given below are some tips on how to best make use of LinkedIn for this purpose:

a) Take the benefit of anchor text and links

Though this appears simple and easy to do, it is very crucial for increasing the SEO. The anchor text has to be used such that it provides the link from LinkedIn profile to your site and if you can manage to generate such links to many sites, you stand to gain substantially in terms of back links. Anchor text using appropriate key words is the answer towards making your site more SEO friendly.

The reason is also because important search engines like Google does a lot of checking of the anchor text in ranking sites and if you have managed the right key words relevant to your site, the ranking is improved to a great extent and your site will find favor with many search engines. The trick is to be creative about the key words and not fall prey to common names or terms.

b) Pay close attention to the key words

While composing your profile on LinkedIn, you must ensure that you select the most appropriate key words. The making of the profile would mean that you may have to mention about your hobbies, the type of jobs you have done, what you prefer and other salient features of your personality. You need to pepper your profile with the most relevant key words so that they link back to your site effortlessly.

c) Make sure you add connections

This is another area, which greatly influences the SEO of any site. You need to add sufficient number of connections to add visibility to the site and this will automatically improve the ranking of your site among the search engines.
d) Customise and tailor make the URL

Finally, it is important to really customize and tailor make the URL according to what you have on LinkedIn so that even the LinkedIn members are able to make changes to their own URLs and not be forced to make do with the one available on default. You can select a name that is close to you and can even opt for the name of your own website. This will definitely lend better visibility and will result in the SEO getting boosted further.

You can discuss this article and other search engine marketing related issues at UK Webmaster Forum

SEO for Google Local Business Listing & Google Maps

Google Business Listings

For quite a while the holy grail of search engine optimistion was to have generic keywords associated with your site product or brand listed on the first page of Google result pages, this is still a desirable position for a keyword associate with your site to be, but there are many other ways to get into page one on Google with far less efforts and possible a better traffic that converts to sale than the old method of targeting generic keywords, this two ways are via Google Base and Google Local Business Listing and Google Maps. This articles focuses on the latter.

Case for getting listed in Google Local Business Listing & Google Maps

Hereford and Borders Canoes

Local business listing is invaluable to businesses that targets a particular locality or only cover a certain area such as restaurants, plumbers, mechanics etc. You business is listed on Google SERPs higher than organic search result giving you a improved click through potential free if charge. Local Business Listing is more detailed than regular organic listing, and the map location that indicated where you business is draws attention to it more than the dull PPC and organic listing that follows.

Take example of someone looking to hire or buy canoes or Kayaks in Herefordshire are, you type the following keywords into Google “canoes and kayaks herefordshire” the first listing on Google result page is HB Canoes and Kayaks. The Google Map/Local Business Listing for this keyword is above the organic listing, it gives the following details about the business:
Business Name
Business Address
Business URL
Telephone Number
Website URL
Telephone Number
Directions
A Market on Google Map to show where Orcop, the business location is.

With this much information right on the first page of a search result, who will not click on the HB Canoes and Kayaks listing?
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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for dating sites Part 1

Online Dating

This post is about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) with particular focus on how it can be applied to a dating site, both regular dating sites and adult dating sites. It deals with the basics, an intermediate to advance SEO practitioner will not find much information he/she does not already know, however there are some dating site specific SEO resources you may find useful at the end of this article.
If you are completely new to SEO and looking for ways to improve your site popularity in search engines, you will find loads of useful information to get your site ranking well. The article will attempt to define search engine optimisation the way the author understands it and then discuss the two main parts to SEO, the conclusion gives tips on how to carry our basic optimisation on both regular and adult dating sites.

To begin from the beginning, perhaps we should attempt to define what SEO is in the hope that the definition will point us to where we need to be.
SEO, or to call it its full name, Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to a process whereby the components of a website such as the graphics, the textual contents including how site layout is optimised to ensure Search Engines crawls and ranks the site highly for topic the site is about.

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Web Links – dofollow, nofollow, backlinks and other webspeak

A link that is not nofollowed is known as dofollow link.  A Dofollow link is a link crawlable by search engine. Dofollow is not a tag, its an attribute you simply don’t nofollow a link if you want it be dofollowed.

A nofollow link on other other hand is one that will not be followed by a search engine robot/spider. This is accomplished by placing the rel=”nofollow” attribute in an anchor tag. This can be useful when you are optimizing a website and do not want to give the destination website credit for the backlink.

No follow links were first developed by Google as a way to control spam links on blogs and sites. By adding the no follow tag to any link, its prevent spammers from posting useless comments simply to get a free link back to a site.
Most people often confuse “noindex” with “nofollow.” In order for a link not show on the results page of SE, the meta robots tag with the “noindex” attribute, <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” /> has to be used.
This meta tag tell search engines that they should not index that page, so it worth include it on the search results.
While “nofollow” attribute tells the search bot comes across such a link, it will know that it should not crawl the site, this link will not be counted toward the PageRank of the site that is receiving it.
A link with a “nofollow”, would look like this: <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.link.com“>link text</a>

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