Ensuring that core functionality works around the world

When you're developing your site's structure for multilingual or multinational audiences, and figuring out where you're going to host it, it's often easy to overlook some of the core functionality of your site that you'll need to ensure is working flawlessly as you enter different different countries and start using different languages. Above all else, we want to provide a Positive User Experience, and while this may not be directly related to SEO, indirectly it most certainly will have an impact on how your site is crawled, as well as how and in what contextyou obtain links from elsewhere on the web.
What this really comes down to is two things: First, it means addressing any common website functionality that might slip through your translations. And second, it means taking a hard lookat regional nuances that you'll need to be able to handle. Let's focus first on Common Website Functionality. Here, we're talking about things like your site-wide navigation, global headers and footers, and even site-wide things like how error messaging or internal search results are handled. You may spend thousands of dollars carefully translating all the words on your site, hundreds of hours developing your website and optimizing your content, only to discover that customers can't locate anything because key functionalities on your site remain in a language that they don't understand.
First, make sure that your menuing system is translated and regionalized. This means not only making sure that the menus and sub-menus are taken into account during this process, but also that you've translated and ordered them in a way that makes sense to the language and the country you're targeting. And make sure that the text hidden in the HTML markup, like meta titles and descriptions, and even the title and alt atributes for links and images are also being translated. Hovering over an image on the Spanish language page and getting an English description of that image, isn't going to help your users or the search engines.

And don't forget about the images that include text. Your beautifully designed "buy now" button contains text in the English language, so make sure to have new images created with the proper languages, and use them throughout that localized site. If you have PDF downloads, videos, podcasts, or other content like this, you'll need to decide whether you'll translate these assets, keep them but add labeling indicating that they've not been translated,or remove them altogether. Good web translation companies understand these things, and they can help you identify every aspect of the website, and translate everything the code includes rather than just the text you see on the screen.
Generally, you'll wanna look at the common headers and footers of your site to ensure that the right include files are being used, and that the language and country targeting is consistent throughout. Since these elements also commonly include links to other parts of the site, you need to make sure that you're staying consistent and providing links to the right localization of each of these common page elements. The "contact us" link, for example,should point to a localized page that's in the proper language and lists the regional office location and contact information first.
And when it comes to e-commerce, you're gonna likely need to be dealing with things like different currencies. This means your e-commerce platform needs to be configured to handle this, and you'll often need to not only default to a local currency, but also offer options for different currencies and perform exchange rate calculations, and this can get tricky. Last, make sure that your localized site reflects local business rules that you need to play by. For example, if your operating site's in the EU, you need to abide by local laws and explicitly let people know that you'd like to use cookies for specific reasons.
And, you need to give users the opportunity to opt into that usage. And you'll need to keep up with constantly changing privacy laws there. You also have your own business conditions to accommodate. For example, if you have different call centers for different locations, make sure the proper numbers and routing is reflected on your support pages. If you can't sell a certain products or services in certain geographies, remove them from the localized site. Or if shipping charges and logistics vary from country to country, make sure to account for those differences in checkout flows.
A general concept in SEO, is that if you do something that's good for your users, it's very likely to be good for the search engines as well. And making sure that the full functionality of your website is optimized and functional across your localizations, is a key component to giving international visitors a great experience, and your international SEO strategy.

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