SEO for multi-language sites

This entry is from Guest Blogger: Shane Magee 

Here are some good practise guidelines for ensuring that your foreign-language pages on your website are more visible to search engines:

• To rank in a country specific Google (i.e google.ie or google.de), you need one of two things: you need to have a country specific domain name, or the server where your site is located needs to be located in that country. If you have a multi-language site on a server in one country, then you need to buy domain names for the countries. You can then use 301 redirection to direct the user to the particular section of your website. All the major companies do this and it doesn’t seem to do them any harm SEO-wise.

• One topic of debate is whether all pages with country domain name qualify for inclusion in the ’search pages from (country)’ option in Google, or whether your server needs to be located in that country. I haven’t yet been conclusively able to find that out. In any case the percentage of traffic coming from these searches is quite small, 7% according to one estimation.

• Keep different URLs for different country pages, rather than using language negotiation. This enables you to ensure that URLs for pages in a different language contains at least some words in that language, which is definitely good practise.

• Search engines are very good at identifying what language a page is in using NPL (Natural Language Programming) but it is still a good idea to specify the language using, the tag. For example, in the German case you would use . (For sites running on Plone, this means you have to manually select the Language in the Properties tab. However, LinguaPlone translations will automatically take care of this for you.)

• There are people who say that if you are linking to a page in another language, the anchor text (or at least part of it) should definitely be in that language: for example if you want to link to a Spanish version of your English page, you should use Espanol instead of Spanish. Hopefully in the near future we’ll be able to verify the truth or otherwise of this claim. If space allows, the best practice for good user experience when linking to a page in another language is probably to include the anchor text in both languages - for example Spanish/Espanol.

  You can also use the HTML attribute hreflang to tell your browser the link language if the link anchor text has to be in English. However this attribute is not supported in IE6; it is supported in Firefox and (I think, correct me if I’m, wrong!) IE7. Here is an example:

German

• Try not to have too much of a mix of languages on a page you are specifically trying to promote for a particular country. In particular, make sure the headings, tabs and titles are in the specified page language. The usual guidelines for good SEO also apply here e.g alt tags for images in the specified language ect.