Translation and search engine optimisation are often seen by the search marketing community as not very compatible. The idea being that you need original copy in the intended language, and that it should be locally optimised. Whilst there is an element of truth in this, there can be a mystique surrounding SEO with it being made to sound more difficult than it is.

Good well written and keyword rich content in English (or any other source language), will result in good keyword rich, and well written content in the target language, at least it will in the hands of a specialist translation team. Good translators work like good copywriters when producing marketing related texts. The style, flow and feel of the text should be appropriate to the target language. The danger is when people try to commission translation on the cheap, by using students, or someone who knows a bit of the other language. The result is bound to end in tears. I read an interesting analogy in an article by the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, talking about the use of students for translation, asking whether you would want an undergraduate medical student to perform your major brain surgery! No, probably not.

Keyword research is also an area of mystique, if you know the keywords in your industry, it isn’t difficult for a translator to give a list of keywords in the target language, even though it will need thought and proper research. For example we have a page about “label translation”, when writing the Flemish version, the translator pointed out that there are two words in Flemish for “label”, the solution is that you need to use and optimise for both, if you want your Flemish page to rank appropriately.

It is important to consider off page factors with international SEO, like running a link campaign for your English content, you will need to do the same in other languages. Its also important that pages are correctly tagged and indexed. You don’t want your translated content to have title tags etc in English, these need to be in the target language as well. There is a lot that can be said about international SEO, and we don’t pretend that this article has all the answers, but the aim is to raise some of the issues to consider.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 12:13 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.