Moving your web site into another language involves many steps and many choices. Getting this process right is critical, and this article deals with each aspect of the process from translation of the site to marketing the site on the search engines used by your target customers.

Translating Your Web Site

Much time, effort and money goes into web site localization. A professional web site localization project can involve:

* Finding good translators (or a good agency) * Choosing the correct target language 'flavors' for your target markets (e.g. European Spanish, Latin American Spanish etc.) * Protection of HTML and other code * Localization of graphics * Text extraction from program-driven areas of the site * Change detection for frequently changing web sites * On going localization of changed pages (without retranslation of the whole page)

Simply translating the site, regardless of how professionally this is done, does not guarantee that your site will be seen by the global audience you expect.

In the same way that search engines should be at the forefront of everything you do on the English site, this same ethos must be used on the translated versions of your site.

Ideally, the planning for global search marketing should start before the site is first localized, but if not it is important to know what steps can be taken to rectify the situation.

This article describes the process of bringing visitors to your multilingual web site. Typical Multilingual Search Engine Optimization

Most Global organizations have a search-engine-optimized web site that they then localize, ignoring the optimization of the localized sites.

Most webmasters are not employed for their linguistic skill and therefore the localization of the site is a painful and intimidating process. Following this process, entering the further unknown area of search engine optimization or multilingual pay per click management is ignored or actively avoided.

There are two common misconceptions around web site marketing for multilingual web sites:

1. Optimize the English site then translate it well and it will be optimized in-language.

Multilingual search engine optimization is often ignored because of the belief that if the English site is optimized for search engines, the language sites will be too. This is not the case.

2. For PPC, simply translate the ad copy and keywords.

Imagine a set of English keywords for a site selling a glass replacement service for cars. The marketing specialist or PPC executive would use their knowledge of the industry and the language to expand out a set of keywords that a user might type in to a search engine. They might come up with terms such as 'vehicle glass replacement', 'car windscreen fixing', 'windshield repair' etc. For this simple service there are a multitude of ways of describing the window, the vehicle and the replacement service that spawn a large number of keyword combinations. A good translator would take each one and translate to the most common, most sensible alternative in their language. Unfortunately, this will lead to a reduction in keywords. Windscreen and windshield may translate to the same common term in French. Replacement and repair may translate to the common term used in French for glass replacement. This is not what is required.

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