Hi all, I am designing a website for a Thai restaurant but the owner has asked me to include "Chinese" related keywords in a bid to capture and convert customers searching for Chinese food! I'm concerned that using Chinese keywords and Thai keywords will limit the page ranking that the site can achieve for Thai related searches. Has anybody encountered this situation before and do you have any advice? Thanks in advance...
Yeah I wouldn't reccomend trying to rank for keywords in two different languages, it's just not going to happen.
hi jijihuqw, if the restaurant is only Thai based then you should put more focus on "Thai" related keywords, If you want to capture traffic from"Chinese" also, you should make Chinese food keywords your secondary keywords. Moreover if your Geo target location is Thai, you should target Thai related keywords more as compared to Chinese related keywords.
But then you'll have the site in two languages, that'll be a pain for anyone trying to read it and search engines aren't going to like trying to read two different languages on the same page/site.
I think it is not necessary to build pages in 'Chinese" language for a Chinese food restaurant, you can still build pages in the same language you used in building for Thai foods, for example in English, people can still find by searching " Chinese food" or "Chinese restaurant"...
Here if the owner wants like this, I suggest you to create new domain. You can create new webpage or website for Chinese Keywords as per owner’s requirement. In the similar way you can do the same for Thai.
Do keyword research. I only just started doing it seriously and my search engine traffic has been increasing regularly.
the way we do it is to create a separate subdomain for each new language version, like cn.ourdomain.com, es.ourdomain.com, etc, and translate the complete site structure and all text content without actually duplicating the site code. in PHP we then simply check the current HTTP_HOST setting and output the appropriate language text. this is also the way most CMS with multilanguage support work. you can of course also add a language parameter behind the URL, but that's less elegant. also, Google seems to give a bit of a bonus in indexing speed to subdomains - some blackhats have recently made big noise with getting a billion subdomains indexed and displayed in a few weeks, generating some insane Google traffic (till they got banned for spam, of course). simply mixing Chinese keywords on a Thai page is pointless and won't do anything in terms of ranking for those Chinese terms.
Why not write an article? I've never really understood the difference between Thai, Chinese and Japanese food other than Thai is generally spicier. Write an article about the difference between Thai and Chinese food or do some sort of FAQ. I guess you could also have something like 'If you've never tried Thai food but like Chinese food...' or <thai dish name> is similar to <chinese food name> except that blah blah blah. I think as long as you explain why you are using both terms you should be fine.