Challenges In Creating Multilingual Websites – SEO Considerations

Lately we have been focusing on creating multilingual websites. When you embark on this task yourself you are likely to be faced with a number of challenges yourself. What are the challenges that you are likely to face? We will limit our discussions to the SEO considerations. If you are handling your multilingual website’s SEO yourself, it will be comforting to know that you just need to apply the same principles that you would apply to your English website. Does this mean that there will be no special challenges in this process? No, you cannot assume that, you should be prepared to certain challenges.

The first challenge comes in the form of finding the right keywords. You might think that what could be the problem there; is it not just the translation of the keywords from English to the target language? Yes, that is what it is supposed to be but you will not find the exact matching translations all the time. Moreover, direct translation of the keywords will not make sense at times. These keywords will have to be based on the search trends of the target language group. This is where you will need the help of experienced SEO experts that will help you with the right selection of keywords in the first place.

Secondly, you will have to work in the content for all the pages of your website. The keywords in the target language should be weaved into the content. Therefore, content creation will be the biggest challenge. When you are translating the content do not use automated translation tools because this will lead to erroneous translations. Even if you are using the translation tools, it is important that it is edited by someone that is proficient in the target language.

You need to understand that creating a multilingual site is not just about providing your visitors with the options to choose the language in which they can view your website but it is more about giving them a complete experience to your website visitors. It will therefore take as much time as creating your base website in English. The investments that you are making and the efforts you are taking will prove to be useful only when you give the visitors with the experience that we are talking about here. If it were not to be for this experience, your visitors may as well use the Google translation tool to view your websites in their language and you need not have to then waste your time and money on creating multilingual websites.

If you are running a CMS based website, then you will have to make sure that these language considerations are also applied to your auto generated pages. You will have to make sure that your website has unique page titles in the respective languages and the URL structures that match the respective language. Always get professional help to get your multilingual websites launched so that you will get the best value for your many.

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