SEO translation and localization of a website
Simply translating your website into other languages will not guarantee it achieves good rankings in the local search results of your target markets. The higher your website will show up in search results, the more visitors you will get, which will lead to an increase in sales. When translating your website, Openvalley takes into account SEO best practices, while creating engaging and accessible content.
A study conducted across the European Union found that only 18 percent of users said they would make online purchases from a site that was not in their own native language. A multilingual website can clearly open up potential new markets that would otherwise be inaccessible. Website localization is a smart option for companies because less than 30% of Internet users speak English. The combination of localized content and SEO ensures that your message is not only reaching your audience, but also engaging them.
Translation / localization of a website
The completed translation should be the most accurate rendition possible of the source material. Translation deals primarily with texts and words, and translation is just the beginning . Localization is the actual adaptation of your website, and can be described as the process of converting the format and content of a website to a form that is linguistically and culturally appropriate to a particular market, including translation, images or color changes, regulatory modifications, etc…
Translation of a website is an on going process
Translation costs can represent a significant component of the internationalization process of a company. Companies need to translate large volumes of text in multiple languages, on a continuous basis. The translation management technology used by Openvalley automatically performs tasks at a fraction of the cost and time required by a human-only process, giving us a competitive advantage to translate larger volumes of texts at a competitive price.
The translation and SEO process needs to be conducted concurrently, rather than subsequently
When translating yourwebsite, you want your website to be engaging for your foreign customers, and this is what localization ensures. There is also the matter of SEO to take into account; localization is an integral part of a multilingual SEO strategy. The Openvalley agency uses a combined process, and the overall project costs are reduced. In addition, having one single point of contact to co-ordinate all aspects of the project, manage localization, translation and SEO, is a significant advantages for companies.
Multilingual Keyword Research
Keywords are keystones of any SEO campaign. Care should be taken when choosing keywords for localized websites however. Our purpose is to identify the highest searched and more lucrative keywords that your website should contain, so that you rank highly in major search engines such as Google, Bing or Yandex.
Translating directly keywords does not work, because keywords are the fruit of a language, and are rooted in the local culture, relying on local habits and behaviors that will vary from country to country — or even region to region. So keywords can’t be translated because they have evolved directly to serve the everyday needs of the people of a particular country. Translation can’t predict that. The solution is to use a native-speaker to conduct keyword research and use those keywords to craft your page titles, description, and keyword tags.
A dictionary translation of “car insurance” into French, for example, gives the term “l’assurance automobile”. This gives poor results in Google’s keyword tools however, with “assurance auto” being far more effective.
Google and other major search engines are getting better at recognizing synonyms as well, meaning we no longer have to juggle content to make it appealing to both web crawlers and the human eye. The recent updates to Google’s search algorithm were designed to deal with keyword stuffing among other spammy techniques, so we should resist any urge to use keyword stuffing.
Translation heading tags
This involves optimizing current web page titles with the keywords identified in the keyword research. Titles and subtitles are important positions for keywords. Search engines pay particular attention to what lies between the HTML heading tags, so we have to make sure there’s at least a H1 containing the primary keyword for every localized page of your multi-language site.
Translation and optimization of title tags
The title element of a web page can be described as an accurate and concise description of a page’s content. The title tag is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization. It should include keywords and Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag,
Translation and optimization of meta tags
Optimizing the description meta tag can be extremely useful however in providing additional information to the search engines on how a particular page should be indexed.
Meta description tags, while not important to search engine rankings, are extremely important in gaining user click-through from search engine result pages. These short paragraphs are an opportunity to advertise content to local searchers and let them know exactly what the given page has with regard to what they’re looking for. So great translation and optimization is obviously needed. The optimal length for search engines is apporximately 155 characters.
Translated anchor links to improve your ranking
The anchor text for the links -if misconfigured- might actually promote the page for keywords of no importance whatsoever, thus hurting your search engine position. Anchor links will then have to be translated and optimized for the target language.
Translated image “Alt” attributes contribute to improve your ranking
What people often forget is that the search engines also consider the “alt attributes” of a picture. The “alt” attributes contain the text that should be shown in the event that the image cannot be displayed.
An example image alt attribute might be for example:
img alt=”Rayban” src=”images/imagexyz.jpg”
Note the “Rayban Sunglasses” attribute, which will be displayed if the imagexyz.jpg image is not available, is meaningless if you translate an English site into another language. A proper translation into Spanish should be like this:
img alt=”gafas” src=”images/imagexyz.jpg”
The “alt” attributes and the image names are considered by the search engines to discern what a page is about. At Openvalley, we also translate the “alt” attributes so that your site gets a better rank in the target language, and your images are listed in Google Images and other Image search engines
Localization of the URLs
One place where to use the researched keywords is in the website URLs. This isn’t crucial but can give a small boost in the rankings of the target counry. Additionally, Google and other search engines will display the portions of your URL that match the search term entered in bold in the SERPs. This can serve to catch a human eye even if you aren’t at the top of the SERPs for that particular search term. The following URLs, for example, use fr as a subdomain or subdirectory to clearly indicate French content:
http://example.com/fr/nourriture-pour-chien.html
http://fr.example.com/nourriture-pour-chien.html
Using a country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) such as .fr for France or .co.uk for the UK can also be useful when it comes to targeting your content to a specific country.
Which languages do we translate?
The major European languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian) and major Asian languages (Japanese, Chinese) are some of the more common languages we translate but we can have access to other languages, please contact us.
Drive more traffic to your website by translating it, and by publishing multilingual content on a frequent basis. Call, or email, our team to receive an instant quote.