May 3rd, 2010 by Susie

If your business strategy includes attracting buyers from non-English speaking countries, then your search engine optimisation services and plan should include content in more than one language. This is widely done on hotel, travel, sport and business websites – in fact, any site where the target audience speaks a variety of languages.

If you have a co.uk website, you may feel your link building strategies are complex enough without diversifying into other languages – but think again. The UK has a large non-native population for whom English is a foreign language. This isn’t restricted to foreign immigrants; many British companies have branches in other countries, and their employees routinely come into the UK on short-term and extended visas to live and work. London, for example, has over 40% non-English residents, many of whom have a large disposable income. Offering your pages in key international languages could substantially benefit both your sales and your SEO.

If you want to introduce foreign languages to your site, you need to know that Google can determine the language of pages a lot quicker if you stick to just one language per page and avoid translations alongside it. Side-by-side translations look messy and unprofessional. Although the Google crawlers can differentiate between multiple languages on single pages, it slows them down and can affect search engine optimization for the entire site.

Web-builders set great store by coding pages to specify language of content (the so-called lang attributes). However, from the point-of-view of search engine optimization, you should know that Google disregards code-level language definition, including document type definitions (DTDs) and language attributes. This is because some editing software automatically creates these codes, not always very accurately. Therefore lang attributes are often an unreliable way to define what language a page is in.

A search engine optimisation company is probably the best place to go for help installing foreign language scripts onto your website. Remember that foreign visitors who conduct searches in their own language will expect to see localised results, just as English-speaking users do. If you want to localise pages, you need to make them visible in all languages. A good SEO company or web-builder will be able to do this using the same SEO tools they do normally.

It’s actually a lot less complicated than people think to create a multilingual website to a site. For a start, there’s no need to create specific URLs for each language. However, it’s often a good idea to introduce identifying tags that tell users what language the link is in. For example, to define English pages you might have the URL http://YourDomain.ca/en/product-page.html, or alternatively http://en.YourDomain.ca/ product-page.html.

French pages would view as http://YourDomain.ca/fr/product-page.html or http://fr.YourDomain.ca/ product-page.html.

URLs structured in this way will make it far easier to index multilingual pages and analyse their performance.

If a search engine optimisation company creates URLs with non-English wording, they must check there are no special symbols included. If there are, UTF-8 encoding must be employed, using the right escape codes (these are codes used to represent the stresses on the letters). Finally, don’t bother adding foreign pages to your internet marketing plan unless you can get them translated professionally. Automated translations are often unreadable, and may be treated as spam by the search engines.

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