Translating websites is an important part of our work, however it is surprising that many companies want their site translated without giving much thought to search engine optimisation. An example of this is that they may want the on page content translated, but not pay attention to title tags and alt text. Guess what – if the spiders see matching title tags and alt text, the likelihood is that they will conclude that they are looking at duplicate content. The best case scenario is that you may get pages ignored for indexing purposes, and the worst case is that your nice new translation may hard the performance of your existing site content.

So what’s the solution, approach an SEO company for multi-lingual optimisation? Well you may choose to do this, and I’m certian there are companies out there who do a great job, but the danger is that you could spend a lot of money for little result. We think that many of the optimisation needs of a multi-lingual site, are based in getting the initial source content right, before starting to work on additional languages. Your web developer may not profess to be an SEO expert, but it is important to have a well constructed site. When it then comes to translation, it is important that the job is done professionally, and that the site is then optimised well in the target languages. This is about having good well written content which is keyword rich in the target languages. This post doen’t pretend to cover the whole topic, but if you are thinking of internationalising your site, talking to us at an early stage can help.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 11:39 am 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.