SEO

Multilingual Websites

Provide your visitors with an optimised multilingual website and be at the top of Google for more keywords in different countries

Multilingual Optimisation: What is it?

Multilingual optimisation is the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic coming to a website from linguistically and culturally specific search engines. Only 6.25% of the world's population speak English and as such English-only websites are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

As a result it is becoming increasingly vital for any company that relies on overseas trade, or would like to break into international markets, to adapt its website in order to make it visible in a range of international search engines.

Multilingual Optimisation: What is its growth potential?

Despite the fact that English has established itself as the 'world-language', people tend to search the internet using their mother tongue. Although 30% of internet searches are currently conducted in English, this figure is set to decrease significantly as international internet usage continues to spread.

Currently the largest increases in internet usage are occurring in the Asian market where China and India are, unsurprisingly, leading the way. Last year 147.1 million people in China alone used the internet for eCommerce. This number is expected to triple by 2011, Google's international growth figures back up this trend and highlights the need for multilingual optimisation.

Multilingual Optimisation: How does it work?

The most obvious way that a company can open its website to international markets is by translating its pages into other languages. However, this is only the first step that needs to be taken and will not necessarily be effective on its own; optimisation will be needed.

It is important to understand that different cultures use the internet in different ways and that a marketing campaign that works well in one country will not necessarily work well in another.

A good example of this would be an English company selling 'football' shirts. It might trade well in England, but if it ignores the word 'soccer' in its SEO campaign it will not even be successful in other English speaking countries such as the USA and Australia. Popularity of keywords such as these are covered by keyword research into each country.

Although this is a fairly obvious example, it illustrates the subtleties of multilingual optimisation. Although most people currently search the Internet using Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the majority do so by means of their local search engines, each of which needs to be researched and understood.

Furthermore, many of the developing countries are developing their own search engines specific to their own culture and in many cases these are beginning to rival and even surpass Google. In China one of the most popular search engines is Baidu, which allows users to search in simplified Chinese.

Baidu is currently expanding and has recently established a local search engine in Japan. As we have seen internet use in China is expanding extremely rapidly and if it continues its current rate of increase search engines such as Baidu will soon become extremely important sources of revenue for companies in the west.

Multilingual Optimisation: How can it benefit my company?

Multilingual optimisation has the potential to introduce a companies' website to huge untapped markets through initial translation and press release optimisation to attract a worldwide audience. As it is still a relatively new practice its massive potential is still relatively unrecognised. As such it has the potential to be an extremely powerful tool and companies who invest in it are likely to reap the rewards of gaining a competitive edge on their competitors, especially when useing SEO techniques such as content syndication.