Be careful with duplicated content, though. If you can, use a title a translated name page for each page URL. Example: website.com/article-about-stuff, in portuguese website.com/artigo-sobre-coisas. This is much better than adding a two-letter language code like website.com/de/article-about-stuff!
Wrong! Google does not view the content in the different language as duplicate content. It's good to organize the content in different folders for SEO. Just make sure you don't use automated translated software to generate the content, they generate garbage.
It is a good idea for u to design the same page with multiply language. And add the multiply language link on the website for choosing.
If you want to make better seo in any specific country try to get backlinks from that country... Google will show you prominently in the searches of that country....
There two types of SEO. one is Onpage and second id Offpage seo. onpage is about putting great content and title and effective keywords. and for offpage seo is concerned, back linking is the most appropriate way, for backlinking blogging is the best way to rank better your website.
Keep one dropdown list where user can select his choice of country. Keep design and content same but where necessary make changes in language. I think it helps to optimize same site in multiple countries.
as someone who actually has a website which ranks in multiple countries, i can tell you right away that most of the comments are wrong, if we are talking about non-Anglophone countries. link building for an existing website targeted at your own country only does not help AT ALL. give each country its own TLD or at least subdomain, and unique content, and not computer-generated translations. translate if you must but use humans. preferably, tailor the content to the country, i.e. have content created from scratch to suit the country. promote locally. transparencia offers some good advice about keeping even URL's local. most localization efforts i see are really awful, and not successful. bottom line, if the local humans won't respond to the localization, the local google won't like it either.
Unless you're going to build separate versions for each country you're targeting and go the full GEO-serving route, which is not cheap to do properly and generally only viable with sites already churning a good amount of money, then your best option is to build a separate landing page for each country you're aiming at, in it's own subfolder domain.com/de/ etc and then GEO target each sub-directory separately in Google webmaster tools. obviously in WP or a CMS that writes URLs and page/ you can do this at page level too if you want.
I completely agree with dcristo, make sure you have the articles properly composed and NOT spinned by any kind of software for different languages. Instead you just keep an option of google translating software in your site. First make sure you concentrate on the .com search engine of google and later on you can starting targeting different country google for SEO, as per your product demands