Top ten mistakes on multilingual websites

4 December 2008

Although companies today generally understand the importance of search engine optimization on their home language websites, they don’t take the same care when translating their websites into other languages. Therefore, many companies have multilingual websites that no one can find. These companies are unaware about what it takes to get their foreign sites well positioned by search engines. As a result, they are missing out on potentially huge opportunities.

Here are ten common mistakes these companies make when creating multilingual Websites:

1. Companies often don’t realize the enormous power of search engines. Did you know that nearly 90 percent of Website traffic is generated by search engines?

2. Worldwide corporations sometimes don’t spend the money to hire a good translator. Maybe you know someone who can speak the language into which you want to translate your Website, or perhaps you’ve thought about hiring a student at a local university who knows the language. Think again. You need to hire a professional.

3. Such organizations don’t use the right key words.

4. They fail to translate their keywords properly. Companies often hire translators who use the most technically accurate phrases, instead of the phrases used most often by searchers.

5. These businesses do not understand the importance of proper language encoding. It is essential to hire a translator who uses the correct language encoding to ensure that text displays properly. This is a major concern for languages such as Chinese, Japanese or Arabic.

6. Such businesses do not communicate effectively with their translators. It is essential to have a workflow that allows close collaboration between search engine marketers and translators.

7. These companies underestimate the power of getting linked. Many companies fail to realize that having many Websites link to your Website gets you higher rankings on search engines.

8. Their Websites don’t have ‘killer content’ – If you want people to come to your Website, you’ve got to make it worth their while.

9. These corporations don’t understand why machine translation doesn’t work for most companies. In an October 2000 article in the New York Times, readers are advised not to use machine translation for anything that “remotely requires accuracy.”

10. They don’t host the Website in the country they are targeting. Many companies don’t realize that hosting the Website in the country they are trying to reach can greatly improve their rankings.

Read the complete article on the PromotionWorld website.

 

 

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