 In past articles I've touched on the basics of localization and some of the SEO techniques that go along with building your Web site to target a specific market. To expand on this topic, let’s walk through some of the basics of creating multilingual and Geo-targeted Web sites.
Geo Targeting vs Language Targeting
This question comes up fairly often: "We have a lot of German clients (or a lot of our Web site traffic comes from Germany) and we want to target these visitors - do we need to create a German version of the site or can we just create a German-language section on our site?"
There are two approaches to creating multilingual sites:
1. Provide a fully Geo-targeted version of the site in the country of choice using the language of choice.
2. Create a language specific version of your site that lives under your primary domain, or is a sub-section of your existing site.
There are numerous arguments for both and the final decision usually ends up being a cost and maintenance driven one. Generally speaking, if you have a product or service that would benefit from Geo-targeting a specific country (i.e. you sell widgets and want to open retail locations to sell your widgets in that country) then approach #1 is your best option. On the other hand, you might have a product or service that isn't country-specific but is definitely language-specific (i.e. you have a software company that is now providing translated versions in specific languages), in which case approach #2 is ideal.
The primary consideration when looking at targeting multiple languages is the use of domains. Does it make sense to actually provide a Top Level Domain (TLD) in each country for each language (Example: using www.example.fr and www.example.de for French and German TLD's respectively) or is it more practical to keep these "sites" living under your primary domain (in sub-directories such as www.example.com/fr/ and www.example.com/de/)?
Having a Geo-targeted TLD for your business using a specific country domain will obviously provide more authority to visitors from those countries and will also improve the likelihood of a higher ranking in the country-specific versions of the search engines (i.e. google.fr, google.de, etc.) but ultimately will require more work to maintain. If you’re using a TLD in a specific country, you should strongly consider actually hosting the site in the target country as well. Although this isn't critical, it is a smart choice because a local host will propagate and perform faster through local ISP's, and it certainly won't hurt to have a local IP from an SEO perspective.
If you decide to keep the sites under your primary domain, it’s a good idea to use 3rd level sub-domains (fr.example.com, de.example.com) to organize the domain structure and then of course create language specific directories (www.example.com/fr, www.example.com/de) to house the different sites/content.
Organizing your Content - Usability
Even if you don't decide to go for a TLD for specific countries, there are a number of factors that will affect the performance of a language-specific site from a usability and SEO perspective:
1. The encoding and language calls within the code should match the target.
2. There should be a local address and phone number attached to the site. If you have a .fr domain you should also have a physical address in France, especially if you are using a country-specific domain.
3. Your content might need to be organized differently so that it makes sense to users from other countries. You might need to re-think the top left to bottom right structure.
4. If you’re linking to any of your language-specific sites (or even sections) from a site of a different language (i.e. your English site to your French site) be sure to name the link appropriately and in the appropriate language (i.e. the link to your French site should say Français rather than French).
5. Everything that isn't proprietary naming should be in the target language (yes, even your print icon, etc.).
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About The Author
Jeff Jones is a Web-optimization specialist. He helps companies improve their Web sites, SEO results and PPC-campaign performance. Connect and collaborate with him on Twitter.
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