The main goal of search engines around the world is to find and provide searchers with relevant and quality results. If you've been through the SEO Fundamentals course here on lynda.com, you know that there are some things you can do to the code behind your pages to optimize them for search engines. And these on-page tactics can help get your content discovered and shared with your target audiences. While virtually all the standard best practices for on-page SEO apply to internationalized sites and pages as well, there are a few difference and nuances as you tailor your content and your user experiences for your global audiences.
You'll wanna do things like optimize URLs, page titles, and meta descriptions to start. And you'll also look at page headings, how to handle images, and you'll wanna think about how you'll link to other content on the site. Again, these are just the basic tenets for on-page optimization. First, your URL names offer a unique opportunityto search engines, and how they understand and categorize your content. They also play a role in the user experience, as visitors may look to the URL to determine what part of a hierarchy they're in. So, having a short concise and relevant URL is key.
For international SEO, that means using your target keyword, or keyword phrase in your URL.And yes, that means using the translated version in your international URLs. For example, if you are running a website promoting the Tyrol region of Austria, and you had a page that you were trying to rank for Tyrol restaurants in English, and restaurants Tirol in German, you might have your main German language page on a URL like this. Here we can clearly see that we're looking at the German language version of this page. And you can see the German words that make up the URL.
If we go over to the English version of this page, you can see that this site has done a great job of updating the URL to reflect the target language. You'd be surprised at how many international sites keep the same URL structure as the primary language for all the different translations. And this is a simple thing to address that can pay big dividends with the search engines. Next, let's take a look at the page title element that appears in head section of an HTML document. While this isn't showing anywhere on the webpage itself, it's extremely important, and it will show in the search results for most every major search engine.
So, just like with traditional SEO, every page on your site should have a unique page title that describes the content of that page. But for international SEO, you'll need to use the local language for that title. And you'll be well served to include your target keywords here as well,preferably near the beginning of the title. Here are the two titles being used by the two versions of the page that we just looked at. There are some length considerations, and you'll definitely wanna keep in mind that search engines like Google will typically show 50 to 60 characters of your title in the search results pages.
But of course, if you're working with other international search engines, you'll wanna make sure that you test how your titles will appear in their rankings, and adjust them accordingly.And don't feel that you need to always directly translate those titles. You can take the time to customize each for the language and region being targeted. Next, although the Meta Description won't help your rankings in most of the major search engines, it does play a valuable role in improving your click-through rates, which will likely impact your rankings indirectly. The Meta Description is what is often displayed under your site's title in the search engine's results page.
And you'll wanna make sure that this is highly tailored to attract your target audience. A good rule of thumb is to use a combination of two sentences. One that communicates the content of the page, and the second, a call to action, or a benefit to the searcher. Done right, this should be compelling text that will entice that user to click the search result that they're looking at. Here are the Meta Descriptions that are being used in the two pages that we've been looking at. And of course, they've been properly translated into the target languages.Again, like the page title, you'll want this content to be unique to every page, and you'll wanna customize this and spend the time to make sure the translations are linguistically and culturally correct.
Space is limited here, and while search engines are making changes to this all the time, a good rule of thumb is to shoot for around 150 characters. Header Tags can be thought of as newspaper headlines, and they're important to search engines and humans alike in identifying the main topic of a webpage. When used as the main site heading, you'll wanna describe the contents of the page with as much accuracy as possible, and try to include your keyword phrase here as well. In the example we've been looking at, you might try a header like this.
Moving along, images provide an added opportunity to optimize for both the user and the search engine. Best practices include optimizing the file name, supplying alternate text that accurately describes the image or the related content, and ensuring that the file size is something that balances both looking great and loading quickly. Remember, performance is always a consideration. Many translations fail to update images, and if you look in the source code of an Image Tag on a German language page, you might see something like this.
While this doesn't really change anything that the human user will see on the page, this is a lost opportunity to show a search engine the language that you're actually targeting. Without too much effort, you can make a copy of that image, rename it, and update this code to something like this. And while file names and alternate text can be translated, you'll also wanna make sure that the image itself is a localized version. Although you should generally avoid text in images as a best practice, it often happens with things like buttons, or words, or promotional items, so don't forget to update these to local language, and consider cultural implications here as well.
Once you've taken care of those, the next thing to focus on is the page copy itself. There's really nothing different here, and reviewing these best practices in the SEO Fundamentals course will help you ensure that you've got well written copy that includes your target keyword phrases, and ultimately resonates with the target user. If your translation follow these best practices, you should have an interesting narrative that will not only entice search engines for your target keywords, but also pull that visitor into your conversion funnel. Last, an often overlooked element of on-page optimization is how your content is linking to the other internal content, and how other content links to it.
For international SEO, this means that you're not only making sure to link pages of a specific language or regionalization to other pages of that same language and regionalization, but you also have an opportunity to link pages between languages. Often, no matter what page you happen to be on, if you choose another language from a selector, it will take you back to the home page of the new language that you've just selected. Now, that creates an extra step,and it might even be difficult to find the same page you were looking at when you have to start all over from the home page.
From a user experience, it's better to have that language selector link to that same exact page of content only in the different language. And from the search engines perspective, this becomes a more relevant link that passes strength onto the individual page of the site, rather than concentrating all of that strength on the various language home pages. Though there are many on-page elements that you can optimize on a page, focusing on these important itemswill help you ensure that you're not only checking off the most important boxes, but that you're leveraging the language and region specific components in your own page international SEO efforts.
And remember that doing this as you launch a new web page can save you considerable effort later, especially in terms of file and URL naming recommendations. But these efforts are well worth it, and they can pay big dividends with more qualified visitors, better local rankings,more click-throughs from search engine visitors, and a better experience once they've arrived.
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