Multilingual Search Engine Optimisation

Its more complicated than generally realised.

Montzen, Belgium is my village, approximately 10 minutes from both the German and Holland borders so you can imagine that search engine optimisation (SEO) for our clients is a challenge. Our target customers may speak any or all of four possible languages coupled with endless combinations of search terms, browser settings and computer language settings.

Leaving aside the differing search terms and therefore your various sets of keyword targets, each different language user will have their own set of computer and browser language and preference settings that will give completely differing search results.

To illustrate the point do the following search on Google.com and Google.be-fr.

management consulting Liège

Our target result Optimagest Management Consulting is 5th out of 313,000 for Google.be-fr but 1st out of 399,000 on Google.com.

In the following few articles I will try to set out my experience in a fairly unknown area of SEO.

Configuring your browser for simple multilingual searches.

First choose a browser that has configurable profiles, in this example Firefox.

Set up a profile for each required language so that your preference language and search engine preferences can be configured.

For Firefox installed with the installer:

Make sure firefox isn't running.

Then open the Windows "Start" menu, click "Run" (or Windows key + R) and then type:

firefox.exe -profilemanager or firefox.exe -P

If that doesn't work (it doesn't on my machine) then you need to type the full path to the firefox.exe surrounded by quotes and then the switch in the "Run" box. e.g.

"C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe" -profilemanager

For Mac OS X launch the Terminal

(Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and enter:

/Applications/firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager

If that doesn't work then include the -bin switch e.g.:

/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin -profilemanager

The profile manager dialogue will open and I recommend that you keep the "default" profile as this will preserve all your current settings. Click on "Create Profile" and follow the instructions. You should create and name a profile for each language and then make sure the "Don't ask at startup" option is unchecked. Now when you start Firefox normally the profile manager will open and you will be able to select your required profile.

As you start each profile for the first time go to "Tools" then "Options...", "Advanced" tab and then click the Languages "Choose..." button. Here set the language that is required for that particular profile and remove the default en-us.

Then open each search engine e.g. google.be in turn and specify in the preferences the required language etc so mirroring as closely as possible the actual setup your target audience will have.

Having gone through this process you will find it relatively simple to obtain reliable search results for each market.

The next stage is choosing your keywords.

To choose your keywords we use all the tried and tested methods that are documented all over the web. But when it comes to multilingual keywords it is not as simple as just translating them into the required languages. It is pointless OptimaGest Management Consulting being number one on Google.be-nl if the chosen keywords are never actually used in dutch.

In our native language the methods to find and target your keywords is straightforward. But once your copy is handed over to the translators this is not the end of the process because they will of course produce grammatically correct sentences and at the same time loose all your keyword rich copy. Therefore a lot more work will be needed before the copy is ready for publishing.

In our mother tongue we can, with a bit of research and practice, produce web site content that just "glows" with pertinent keywords and phrases leading on to mega search results. But where do you start in language 2, 3 or 4?

That will be the subject of my next article.This article is free for republishing
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