Language Based SEO
I was asked about SEO for different countries and localisation (localization 
of multi language sites, so I decided to capture my findings and share my observations here:
Multi Language Keywords
In the English speaking world, we are lucky as the internet works well and search terms (other than minor variations in English like holiday/vacation, taxi/cab etc) works pretty well, but how many of us ignore the users who for example, are using Google.de and typing in German search terms. I guess pretty much most of us. Now obviously we need to consider the site itself, the keywords, and the domain, so where do we start? – and how do we optimise a site in multiple languages?
I started to look at the relevant keywords firstly in English. This is pretty basic stuff and the tools exist online to do that. So I took the top 50 keyword’s and Phrases in English and “literally” translated these using Google translate (or Babelfish) as a starting point, but I’d strongly recommend getting a native speaker to check them as there are major significant cultural differences in each country’s language that can make you look ridiculous if you are not careful!
Secondly search the relevant Google Site for other “Target language” sites using your keywords. The objective being to identify the German (in my example) keywords that they are using to get to their top spots. It’s worth asking the client for some example “competitor” sites in their chosen language. Again, use the Google Tools to pull out the keywords. This will give you another list hopefully with a fair degree of overlap. You’ll need to drop all these words into a spreadsheet to keep track of them. You can also use Google’s Insight tool to compare popularity of different terms in different locations.
In line with good SEO practicee, you should of course, target sections or pages of your site to different groups of keywords, but I’ll keep it simple for this example.
Top Level Domains, Sub-domains or Directories.
There doesn’t seem to be any definite answer to this. but you have 3 main options (in order of preference) :
- Create a whole new domain (mysite.de) and optimise this for the language (ensure that Google’s Webmaster tools, know which site is for which language)
- Create a directory for each language (mysite.com/de/) – this is what microsoft do (http://www.microsoft.com/de/de/default.aspx) (use the ISO 639 2 letter country codes!)
- Create a sub domain (de.mysite.com), and add the language specific content to that
There seems to be plenty of speculation n which is best, but of course it may depend on your own data structures.
Translating Content
Ideally each of your pages (and even your menus) need to be re written by a copywriter who is a native speaker. Its not normally enough to simply “translate” the page.
What about your visitors?
The point of this whole process is to attract visitors from more than one country; and preferably direct them to the right language or section. To achieve this, you can use IP detection code to detect which country they are visiting from. Google provide an API that lets you achieve this and would allow you (using code) to direct visitors from Germany to the German version of your site or pages. You can also detect user language by browser settings, but this may be less accurate. Of course, you also need to provide users with the option to change languages manually (for example you may still want to read in English even if you are in Germany). Some experts recommended that language options are not provided using the obvious “flags” – as many countries share languages and visitors may be offended (or less inclined to click) if they don’t see country flag listed. eg: many countries speak Spanish, so don’t just show the Spanish flag – list countries by name.
Keep in mind also that some countries have multiple languages as well as some languages being spoken in multiple countries.
Link Building
As with “normal SEO” remember that you need to focus on link building from other sites in your target country and get links to point to the appropriate (language) content on your site.
What about my Servers?
Google claim that they take the physical location of your servers into account when serving results as they
In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, “.co.uk ” domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server’s IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content. more
