Hi All, I have a question that I would like to get some different member feedback on. We have an English language site that is directed at teaching the English language. So we have many different languages for the site. We want to come up on the first page of Google Japan, Germany, etc etc in those languages. Can someone with some good knowledgable experience please let me know whether i need to do something different to get ranked on these other language sites or whether translating the sites and ensuring all meta tags and important keyphrases are intact, and ensuring a good backlink strategy in the given language is all I need to do. Comments from people with experience here is very appreciated.
Actually that depends up on what term you want to be top and how much effort you put in for seo. If you can rank for a particular KW #1 for english version, then ranking for same term on other engines will be pretty easy.
Thanks. It isnt particularly competitive. What I need to see is whether it actually requires any reprogramming etc. As far as I know if we do an effective translation and build out the meta tags and backlinks that should suffice. Can anyone please confirm this for me. Its an interesting problem.
Are there any other comments regarding the ability to optimize Foreign Language sites? I was hoping to put plan together and get as much info as I could to view/show.
Yes when putting up your Japanese site use the UTF-8 incode instead of the shift-jis. This way even if your backlinks are shift-jis or utf-8 it improves your ranking. One of out sites used to be shift-jis for years & had low visability. It has both Japanese shift-jis & euc-jp 6 utf-8 backlinks. As soon as we changed the encode the results completely changed & the pagerank changed completely too. Only docomented from experience.