The internet puts a vast audience at your fingertips like never before, but a little forethought is needed in order to fully unlock its potential.
Firstly, a few facts to convince you of the need for a multilingual approach: almost three quarters of internet users surf in a language other than English, according to Internet World Stats, and the majority of web surfers (even multilingual ones) place more trust in sites written in their own native language (according the Common Sense Advisory).

Target by language or location?

The first thing to decide when going global is whether to target markets grouped by a common language, or by location.  You may consider a single Spanish language site sufficient to cover markets in both Spain and Latin America, while a single French site could cover France, French-speaking parts of Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec and a number of former French colonies in Africa.

This may be both cheaper and easier than setting up a fully localised site for each country, but there are advantages in creating sites for countries rather than languages, as linguistic usage can vary from place to place. A computer, for example, is an “ordenador” in Spain but a “computadora” in parts of Latin America – having geographically targeted markets means you’re less likely to fall foul of these regional linguistic variations.

Consider a localised domain

Geographical targeting also gives you the option of boosting your SEO by investing in a separate country code top level domain (or ccTLD), such as .es for Spain or .fr for France, for each of your localised sites. As search engine algorithms place a great deal of importance on location, having a separate ccTLD will boost your rankings on Google’s local search engine as well as any local competitors.

Even if you decide not to go for separate ccTLD’s, you should at the very least separate your localised content onto separate subdomains or subdirectories. This will keep your different language pages apart and will keep the bots crawling your site from getting confused. Google also has a Geographic Targeting tool in Webmaster Tools that allows you to set the intended country for different subdomains and subdirectories (so even if your site is hosted in the UK, you can set your French subdomain’s location as Paris).

Translate your content…

Once you’ve made these key decisions and organised your site accordingly, the next step is to translate your content. This can be done most easily by installing a translation widget such as Babelfish or Google Translate into your site, however it’s worth remembering that machine translation is not flawless and your foreign language sites could end of looking amateurish.

Using a native speaking translator will help avoid contextual and linguistic mistakes and retain the nuances of your content. While it is the more expensive option, it’s really a judgement call pitting cost against effectiveness.

…but don’t directly translate your keywords

However you decide to translate your content, you should never rely on a straight machine or dictionary translation for your keywords. These are perhaps the single most important aspect of SEO and effective keywords can vary greatly between one market and another.

A literal French translation of ‘car insurance’, for example, would be ‘l’assurance automobile’. This is used very infrequently as an actual search time however, with alternative phrases such as ‘assurance auto‘ or ‘assurance voiture‘ being much more popular. A little local knowledge will certainly help here, and thorough research with Google’s keyword tools is essential.

Build local links

As in all SEO, building back links is hugely important. When dealing with localised or multilingual websites it’s not only the relevance but also the location of the site linking to you that you’ll want to keep in mind. In practical terms this might mean leaving guest posts or comments on similarly themed sites located within your target market.

Finding a French site highly ranked by Alexa, for example, and posting a comment with a link back to your site might involve extra work, but each link will provide a small but significant boost to your site’s credibility, and therefore your Google ranking.

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of global language services and localisation agency Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 130 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries.

Contact Lingo24 with a translation request mentioning www.seojulie.co.uk before 30 November 2010 and receive a 10% discount on your first order.