One SEO strategy that I've found useful is the inclusion of translated pages on a website. By adding foreign-language versions of their websites, webmasters have the potential to significantly improve their exposure to non-English speaking visitors and to Search Engines. While many non-English speakers would prefer to access the World Wide Web in their native languages, roughly 80% of internet content is authored in English only. From a Search Engine perspective, some of the world's most rapidly-growing search engines (e.g., China's Baidu) will only index pages that are written in non-English languages. From a quality standpoint, automatic translation is generally inferior to hand translation. Although translation programs have improved considerably over the past decade, no automatic translation algorithm can truly address all cultural and linguistic subtleties. To demonstrate, visit Google Translate and convert the following sentence from English to Japanese: Now, translate the result back into English, and you will see: The second message still does suggest to the reader that some form of "translation of text" took place between the English and Japanese languages. However, much of the original message gets lost in translation. For webmasters, automatic translation allows makes it possible to make their content available to the non-English speaking world. While automatic translation would not be appropriate for certain types of content such as legal documents or poetry collections, automatic translation can be very beneficial where language demands are less exacting. Compared to hand translation, there are compelling reasons that favor automatic translation. First, automatic translation is much less expensive than hand translation. Second, with automatic translation, the foreign-language versions can instantaneously adapt to content changes on the source page. There are two general approaches that webmasters can use to translate a website into foreign languages. The first approach would be to direct visitors to the Google Translate website for the translated content. This is free, but is somewhat slow. Also, the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefits for a website are limited (if any), since the translated pages are located on an external website (i.e., Google). The second approach would be to purchase a translation script that stores "cached" versions of the foreign-language versions on your own web server. This approach is preferable from an SEO perspective, but does involve a nominal up-front cost. My own experience? Within 2-3 weeks of having set up auto-translated pages on my site, my number of pages indexed in Google went up from about 300 to about 3000. The vast majority (I'd say about 95%) of my web traffic still lands on my English-language pages. However, this technique has helped me along with my "Long-Tail" results in the Search Engines (I do notice quite a few visitors arriving at my site using the "translated" keywords). Overall, I'm sure that a human-translated foreign-language page would perform even better. However, from a "cost-benefit" perspective, I'm quite pleased with the overall impact that translated pages have had on my site's performance. When implementing automatic translation, webmasters are advised ask a native speaker to review the translated pages' content. Similar to any other change that you might consider for your site always think first of your site visitors.