Optimizing for countries or languages

International SEO is about promoting and optimizing your content in order to make the site visible to a target market or audience across multiple countries and/or languages. Depending on your business objectives it could be that your site just needs to provide specific content to specific language populations. Think of a US company that only serves the US but still recognizes the need to cater to a Spanish speaking population. Or a Canadian organization that needs to attract both English and French speakers.
Or maybe, you're a multinational corporation with locations in multiple regions all around the world and you need to not only have content available in local languages but maybe evenentire websites dedicated to these countries. Not only would you need a French Canada internationalization you would also need a French version for France and maybe business conditions dictate what you can or can't sell in each country. Or if you're a news publisher,you may have a completely different set of content country by country. As you begin to develop your international SEO plan, you'll need to make sure it reflects your business needsand think carefully about whether you're marketing to specific languages, regions or a combination of both.
If the goal of your business is simple to provide the same content in multiple languages then you'll be focusing on optimizing your site's translated content in order to be found by search engines. A multilingual site simply offers users a choice of more than one language. Search engines have come a long way with respect to language detection. And these days you can assume they'll be able to easily pick up on the languages you have your content translated into. But no matter how smart they might be, you're still going to want to take advantage ofsome techniques to send strong signals and indicators for the language you're using on a page of content including the target language and URL structure such as in a subdomain or subfolder.
There's one tactic that tends to work very well for this. If you were a search engine crawling through these pages, the use of either a subfolder or subdomain with internationally recognized language codes would send you a strong language signal and help you index this content appropriately. For multinationals and larger enterprises however we'll have to be able to accomodate more than just a translation of the same content into different languages.Often there'll be different offices operating in different countries with different business environments and your optimization efforts will be spent making sure visitors can discoverand consume that regionalized content.

And both their local region and their local flavor of language. The Spanish spoken in Spain for example is very different from that of Mexico. And that's a very different Spanish than what's spoken in Argentina. You can see how all these combinations can become pretty complex but a simple example for North America would be a website targeting the Canadian and US markets. Even though both are English speaking countries, there are differences and nuances in the languages that publishers need to consider and address. And when you do, you'll find that citizens in the respective countries will not only appreciate the content for its relevance and readability but also find it easier to discover your site and search engines.
And of course, there are large markets of French speakers in Canada and Spanish speakers in the US that will need to be accommodated as well. At this point, you're hopefully realizingthat there's not a single right answer to the way you'll handle language and country targeting but instead, this will largely be driven by your business model. Whether your site's focus is multilingual, multiregional or both, you'll need to pay close attention to how its structured andhow search engines are able to discover and understand your content so that they candeliver it to the target markets when they are searching.

CONVERSATION

0 nhận xét:

Đăng nhận xét

Back
to top