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Translation SEO Best Practices

By Julie Ann Ross

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 07Nov2011 Word count: 513 Viewed: 120 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Translation SEO may be the next big thing as more multinational companies localize their services, products, and even websites in different countries. Translation SEO is the idea that a website — say, one built in the U.S. — is translated into another language like German or Japanese, in the hopes that the SEO juice (that's a technical term) will be the same on the overseas search engine.

Many companies think running their website through a machine translator will perform just as well on the localized Google as it did in the U.S. Of course, translation SEO is not that easy.

For one thing, those translations are often word for word translations, and don't follow sentence structure rules or use idioms. Nothing is more embarrassing, for example, than finding a phrase like "Man, I'm hot!" doesn't mean you're overheated in German, but that you're. . . feeling very amorous. There are similar pitfalls when using machine translations, and you may find that people in other countries are finding your site for. . . "other" reasons.

Here are three other best practices for translation SEO.

Translation SEO Practice #1: Research country specific keywords.

People not only call things by different words in different countries (an "elevator" in the U.S. is a "lift" in England) but they may use entirely different search terms when they do perform a search. Do country-specific keyword research, rather than relying on your knowledge of the culture and language.Also, don't rely on the staff in your overseas office. Many companies call a product one thing, while searchers and potential customers call it something else, both in the U.S. and other countries.

Translation SEO Practice #2: Optimize your site to rank within high search market targets.

This means following the best practices of the popular search engines in that country, which may not always be Google. In Russian it's Yandex, in China it's Baidu. And their best practices are not necessarily Google's, which means your translation SEO is more than just following Google's best practices. It means you need to work with SEO professionals who have extensive experience in those countries.

Translation SEO Practice #3: Don't duplicate pages from other websites.

Even if you translate to another language, it's never a good idea to duplicate pages, unless there's a reason to do it. (And in that case, make sure you designate the original pages as the "canonical" pages.) Rather, make sure your translator is also a decent writer who can rewrite the copy enough so it's completely different. Otherwise, you could still suffer the same duplicate content "penalties" that other web designers see when they repost the same content on different websites.

Translation SEO, if done properly, can help a company achieve the same online success they have seen in their home country. It's a matter of finding the best keywords, and working with experienced SEO professionals who know how the other country's search engines work.

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