How can I SEO optimize my website for foreign languages?

First off, congratulations are due for deciding to take the step into the foreign language internet! I think you'll find that, once you've gotten over the language and cultural barriers, marketing your business online in foreign languages is actually easier than in English, since there's less content online in other languages, and therefore less competition.

Depending on which countries you're aiming to target, there will be different search engines for which to tailor your SEO strategy - for instance, in Japan Yahoo! is the most popular search engine, while in China it's Baidu. Each search engine has slightly different rules - Yahoo! likes a higher ratio of keyword density to Google, for instance - but there are three simple rules that will help you to rank across all search engines: Keywords, Location, and Links.

Keywords: Your first step before you begin to build your translated websites is to work out what your foreign language keywords will be, as these are the fundamental building blocks of your SEO strategy.

There's a simple three step process to this: Translate, Research, Analyse. First off, take your list of English keywords and translate them into the foreign language. You can use a dictionary for this, but you will get better results using a native speaking translator, as sometimes the most effective keyword can be slang term, an adoption from English or any other term. For example, the literal translation of 'weekend' in French is 'fin de semaine', but this is only used in French Canada - in France, they use the term 'le weekend'.

Once you have your translated keywords, brainstorm a list of alternatives by searching for synonyms in a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker, and by checking the websites of competitors in the local market to see what terms they are using. You can either do this yourself using Google Translate, or outsource to a translator or multilingual SEO professional.

Last, but not least - analyse. Use the relevant keyword research tool for your search engine to check what levels of traffic each keyword receives, and decide on a list of both long and short tail keywords. For instance, if you are selling baseball caps to the French market, you might use short tail keywords such as 'casquette' and long tail keywords such as 'vêtement hip hop Paris'. You should now optimize each web page on your site for no more than two keywords, by including the keywords in your page titles, introductory paragraphs and Meta Data.

Location: Most search engines - Google in particular - now place a lot of emphasis on location when ranking search results. So, if we take the aforementioned example of your business wanting to sell baseball caps to the French, then it will help your rankings greatly if you have a French country-code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) such as www.yourcompany.fr hosted on a server in France.

This may not be financially feasible, however, so you can also create a subdomain off your main site for the French language - in this case, you should use the Google Webmaster Geotargeting tool (or the geotargeting tool for the appropriate search engine) to set the location of your French pages as France.

In either scenario, it will also help to have location pages within your site. Let's say that you have done your market research and discovered that the greatest demand for baseball caps in France is in Paris, Marseilles and Lyon. In this scenario, it will help to have separate pages on your site optimized with region-specific keywords such as 'acheté casquette Paris' or 'acheté casquette Marseilles'.

Links: The final essential element of SEO is to gain back-links to your site. Google in particular relies heavily on evaluating the number and quality of back-links to a website when judging that site's relevancy.

The easiest way to get back-links is to find out what the respected online directories and catalogues are in the local internet and posting business profiles there, with a link back to your site - for instance, www.pagejaune.fr (the Yellow Pages) or www.lesannuaires.com in France. Alternatively, you can write content that is related to your topic (for instance, an article 'How to choose the right baseball cap size'), translate it using Google Translate and post that article to article directories in the local web, including a back-link to your site.

The more complicated (but also more effective) version of this strategy is to pitch expert articles to respected blogs and websites in the local web, offering original content in exchange for a back-link. This increases both your back-link ratio and your brand exposure, but it requires both language skills and experience in writing and public relations, and is an activity best undertaken by multilingual online PR professionals.

I hope these tips have been of assistance - and good luck on your forays into e-commerce in the foreign language internet!

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For goodness sake, in any advertising situation DO NOT rely on translation software, have the translation done by a human professional in the field! The stories of poor translations leading to misunderstandings and hilarious situations are very many, and none of them make for good business. Even in your article there are two poor sentences in French, that would sell nothing at all because they mean that the purchase is already done.
Other than that, the advice in the article is very valuable.

Posted by: Cristina at January 24, 2011 8:59 PM

It is interesting to see this topic from the point of view of the internet vendor because here is how I have always seen it:

I am a guy in Paris looking for a store that sells baseball caps and can't find one because the search engine results are overrun with internet vendors that aren't even in Paris. Thanks a lot!

Trying to find real local businesses online shouldn't be as hard as it is.

Posted by: Dan at January 30, 2011 1:59 PM

Oh yeah, since I'm already off on a rant--

What's even worse than all those online baseball cap vendors are all the websites that don't even really HAVE any caps...I'm talking about those search-hijacking marketing jerks who pretend to be a vendor but aren't. They take your money, take a cut, and THEN try to find a real vendor to fill your order. If the item is hard to find or something goes wrong, good luck to you getting a refund or exchange.

Wow I am really getting curmudgeonly. Sorry.

Posted by: Dan at January 30, 2011 2:12 PM

Very useful post. If you want to reach more audience to your Website or blog, the translating strategy can be a good way to achieve that propose. But be careful with the translations machines, they are never accurate and sometimes they change the meaning of sentences completely.

Posted by: MC at June 28, 2011 10:41 AM

You need it only if you sell something but in my case as a consultant I don't think I need SEO in language I can't speak?!

Posted by: Steve770 at June 29, 2011 2:44 AM

I put a language translator on all of my blogs.

Posted by: mike at July 11, 2011 12:28 PM

I have established my online store site for almost about 1month. It is now a big question for me that I could not search my site via google.This article is a big help for me,thanks for the writer!

Posted by: kevin at December 9, 2011 1:40 AM

YES, I HAVE TRIED TO ENQUIRE TO NO AVAIL ON HOW TO TRANSFER SOMETHING THAT I HAVE WRITTEN TO MY WEBSITE INTO A FOREIGN LANGUAGE...OR EVEN SOMETHING OFF OF THE INTERNET..HOW CAN I TRANSFER SOMETHING TO A FOREIGN LANGAUGE

Posted by: DON HUFF at April 9, 2012 1:12 PM

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