By David Gikandi, CEO, SearchPositioning.com
[October 24th, 2001]

See Also   Email Marketing Primer   How to Increase Your Online Sales   Take Advantage of Google's AdWords   Using Foreign Search Engines to Boost Your Sales   Getting Sure Profits Through Google, Goto.com and DirectHit   Ten Places You Must Submit Your Site   Clever Profit Growth Software   The Power Of Personalized Email   How To Go Long With Your Web Marketing   How NOT to Promote Your E-business   Winning the Search Engine Wars   Latest Tips on Search Engine Marketing   Are You Wasting Your Money Online?   Should I Hire Another Salesperson or Invest in an Affiliate Program?   The Death of Positioning?   Links: Why You Need Them and How to Get Them   Your #1 Overlooked Business Asset

[This is the second part of a two part article. The first part can be read here].

Step one is to get together all our keywords in English. Make a list of all the words and phrases that people mostly use to find you on search engines. Once you have this list, go to some free online translation sites and translate your list into all the necessary languages. You can translate them free using machine translation services, although for better accuracy you would want to pay for human translation. The site mentioned above has a free tool that brings about 30 languages together. To start with, translate into French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. There are free machine translators on the web for all these languages.

Step two is to have these translated keywords on your site. There are three ways of doing that:

The easiest and cheapest way is free. It is not as effective, but it is far better than doing nothing. All you do is insert these translated keywords into your site pages title tag (very important) and Meta keywords and description tags, plus in the body text and headlines of your pages. That alone is far better than having a 100 English site.

The other thing that you can do is still more effective. This is making pages for each language. The cheapest way to do that is to use these free machine translators online to translate each of your web pages. That translation will not be too accurate but it is good enough. Better accuracy is achievable through human translation services. Once you have all your pages translated, be sure to link them together from your home page. By the way, the instant translators described above are great for giving speakers of a wide variety of languages instant local language translations of your site, but because these translate on the fly, they do not help in your foreign search engine efforts. Only static built pages are indexed.

The best effectiveness is obviously achieved if you can make a page optimized for each keyword and for each language. These are optimized doorways in each language and keyword - and their effectiveness is just as great as the effectiveness of English doorways. The easiest way to attack such a task is to use a combination of the free translation services we have talked about and doorway generation software such as the one at www.PositionWeaver.com. What you would then need to do is to make up a long paragraph text in English, translate that along with your keywords, then plug them into PositionWeaver or similar software and in minutes you have optimized pages in any language of your choice!

Step three in our strategy is to submit our new multilingual site to not only the usual English search engines, but also to the foreign search engines. Many of the big English engines have localized editions and if they don't they still index foreign language pages. The foreign engines also exist, although you may never have heard of them. Do not assume that all Germans or Japanese, for example, use Google, AltaVista and Hotbot like you do. They may never even have heard of these, preferring to use their own engines. Do some research into this to find out what each country or peoples use. You can submit to these engines but of course because the users primarily search in their language, a purely English site would be totally lost in them. But luckily, now you know how not to be purely English.

Well, then, my great explorer friend! Go out and conquer foreign lands for your financial gain. I wish you great enjoyment in your adventures! Adios!

Article written by David Gikandi, CEO at PositionWeaver.com (a search engine optimization software developer) and co-CEO FatSMS.com, a new, globally targeted SMS text messaging and mobile phone services company. If you wish to have an instant translator on your site, see http://www.positionweaver.com/transguide/