I see loads of them, from real estate to travel, big and small websites..... But how do they do that? Is there an 'easy' way of offering a web page in a language other than English? Does 3 different languages mean a website 3 times the size?
Well don't go the on-line translation tool road. I use these tools and the IMtranslator plug-in for Firefox tends to work quite well, but the results of alll of these tools are often weird. A site in three languages, will not necessarily bring you 3 times the traffic. It might bring you 1 x or 10 x, depending on the quality of your content, the seo, the interest in the national group, etc. If you can have your site professionally translated in another language, including page titles and metas, have somebody who knows the second language write a sheaf of potential anchor text links and descriptions and create a logical internal stucture then yes, it is worthwhile. Have you ever come across directories, link exchanges, etc., that only want sites in English? The same exists in foreign languages, giving you site that much more exposure. If your product/service appeals to an international crowd, by increasing language, of course you are increasing your market. What about Adsense if you are in to that? If you have a range of pages in Spanish, you will get Spanish ads, appealing to your Spanish audience. If you are going to do it, spend the money on professional translation.
Thanks for the info. I have used online translation myself and they do give some very wierd results sometimes. So going the professional translation route is the best way I guess. But my concern is having my English Page then having to have a German page and a French page completely written from scratch!! Its gonna be expensive!!
You are right. Going for professional translation would be too expensive and going to cost you good space on your server if not three different websites. YOu may try using google's online translation tool. It's not bad. Have been using it for quite some time and the results are not that wierd. Try for yourself by first checking the traslation of your web page at (translate.google.com/translate_t) and then you may implement it to your site. Best wishes !! Prashant
Hi Arcos, I'm just doing one which will be in 6 languages (one website) and another in 3!!! (one website). What I tell clients is to remember if you have a website in Greek, you will get queries in Greek and will need to reply to those in Greek!!! I split our Spanish estate agency into two sites Eng/Esp and a link on each page will take you to either version. I'm in Arcos tomorrow viewing a cortijo and then onto Grazalema before somehow getting back to Sanlucar for the football!! Ian
The easy way to create multi language website as far as i know is by using Joomla CMS with Joomfish component. It quite simple and requires small amount of space. There's no need to duplicate existing website, all you need is only translate the words, thats it. Here's the site using dual language within JOmla www.djavaweb.com
I helped a client who has a number of top SERPS for English phrases in her field (we're talking niche here, only about 540,000 positions) She wanted to do the site in Spanish and I asked her to have the main content pages translated by a worker - not a prof translator. The worker would better know the actual language used in the industry anyway. I also asked that the Titles, alt text and metas be translated in the same way. Now she has no. 1 position in Google in English and no. 2 in Spanish. The site has not been translated 100% - maybe only 40% of the pages. They run alongside the main site and are accesible via a Spanish flag from every page of the English site. It has been simple to do and a successful experiment. She'll probably go ahead and do it in German or Flemish this year. Ian OK's advice is good. Only go to the trouble if you have the capability of dealing with queries in the other languages.
This might be a silly question, but exactly what do you mean by "run alongside?" Do you mean that the pages are simply a part of the site as a whole, just in another language, with the linking provided by the flags?
Yes. If the English page is called prices.htm the Spanish is called es-prices. All the Spanish pages have the prefix es followed by the same name as the English page. es-index, es-sites, etc. If I had to do it again, I would use a Spanish word to name the file rather than an English one. That was dumb on my part as I have found that file names help the serps. To a small extent maybe but every little helps, right?
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