Multilingual SEO

Not all of us realize that just by launching our website we are making our business into a global entity. Whether we like it or not our websites give our business a global dimension. This being the case, only few businesses worry about multilingual optimization. It is rather surprising to see why so few are concerned about multilingual SEO.

Through multilingual SEO you can improve your website’s visibility and improved visibility is directly proportional to increased website traffic. You can even cut through search engines that are cultural specific.

One’s potential market is no more limited to the local market. With online shopping any one can shop from any corner of the world. So it would be an ideal investment for your business to launch a multilingual website. If you take into consideration the overall population that uses English we will rush to get multilingual websites. It is a surprisingly low figure it is just between 6 to 7% of the world’s population that speaks English and only around 25% of people use English on the worldwide web.

With the addition of each language, you are increasing adding more crowds to your client base. It is not only the English speaking crowd that is using online shopping tools but the entire world is moving towards this phenomenon.

Once you decide to launch your website in multiple languages you must find out how the people of that language would search your products or services because people’s search trends vary greatly from culture to culture. So prior to optimizing your site, an overall understanding the search trends of each language group is highly essential.
Moreover, you can tap the potential of the unexplored market by adding more languages to your website; moreover, you will have to fight lesser competition in some of the markets, which will be a great advantage.

Few markets that you can concentrate include the Chinese market and the Japanese market. It has been observed that Brazil too is getting increasingly popular.
When you are selecting additional languages for your website, you must pay attention to the growth potential and the buying capacity of each language group based on their economy. Therefore, your business development efforts should go hand in hand with the SEO efforts. Most of the countries are more portal oriented; they prefer to get everything in one place so portals thrive there. So when you are targeting international markets besides the English speaking zones, you must not limit your SEO to Google and Yahoo. While you concentrate on Google and Yahoo for your English website, the other languages of your website should employ alternative strategies to attract the international market.

As it is evident when you are concentrating on international markets your SEO targets should go further than Google. You must identify the top portals of the other countries that you are trying to reach and you must try to focus your SEO efforts basing these portals otherwise your approach will be too scattered due to lack of proper understanding of certain markets. Concentrating on these portals will give you a good start.

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