The vast majority of SEO in Internet advice applies to websites in English with an emphasis on the United States. England and Australia can give some advice on the regional promotion, but the fact remains, advice on promotion of multilingual and foreign websites are very few.

Peace, and in particular for Internet becomes international. Your site may have people of other countries who speak other languages. More and more companies want to work in several regions with the help of multilingual sites. The question arises, how to properly use of SEO, to succeed among a multilingual audience? In other words, it does not violate Google’s policies, using more than one language?

Map

The first thing you need to do – identify target regions and languages. For example, if you live in the northern US, it would be advantageous to provide a French version of the pages to Canadians. You live in the southern states, and there resides a large part of the Spanish-speaking population. Can you focus on the promotion throughout Europe, where it is necessary to rely on the French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, etc.? Or do you do the technique, and you can get traffic from numerous Asian countries?

Choose your target locations and languages, which are planning to develop the project.

domain

You have several options when it comes to your domain name.

ccTLD – top-level domains for countries. You have to create multiple sites for each country. For example, you will own www.mybusiness.com, www.mybusiness.fr and www.mybusiness.de. «.com» In the address is replaced by the .co .uk or for the sake of clarity, the region where the site is. This method is very convenient in location targeting and allows you to maintain a separation between each version of the site. There will be no confusion as to which version of the site the user should see. On the other hand, the promotion and maintenance of several sites is expensive, and in some countries, the site must meet certain requirements to obtain the Domain ccTLD.

gTLD Subdomains are a simple way to utilize generic top-level domains. In the example of fashionable cause us.mybusiness.com, fr.mybusiness.com and de.mybusiness.com. You can use Google Webmaster Tools, to easily adjust the geo-targeting, and you can separate the location of the server from the sub-domains for a more rapid response of each version of the site. On the other hand, the value of some of the sub-domains may be unclear.

gTLD Catalogues another opportunity to specify the regions in the URL. In this case, addresses for different regions will look like this: www.mybusiness.com/de/и www.mybusiness.com/fr/. This method is also simple and easy to adjust your location targeting. On the other hand, you can not use a different host for each directory. Some users may not recognize the country code and take over part of the sub-URL.

The choice of method depends on the business and, in many ways, on your investment budget. If you have the ability to support multiple sites using a ccTLD – this is probably the best choice. Otherwise, the choice depends on how you important speed server response. But if you’re trying to track multiple domains one system analysts, top-level domains can cause complications.

If your goal is specific country, you can use the tools for webmasters and I target without the need for special domains.

Note the gTLD

Common top-level domains are diverse, although most companies choose a standard .com. In fact, you can find .aero, .coop, .int, .mil, .name and others. Your choice is not limited to strictly one embodiment;sometimes buy alternative domain names and redirecting to the desired page is a great way to avoid confusion. In addition, regional domains .eu and .asia perceived by Google as a common top-level domains, and not related to a specific region.

Location server

Often referred to factor in SEO is time website response. In years past, the best way to reduce the response time in a foreign region, was to buy a place on the appropriate server. Today, it is not always the case. Many web hosts use special technology to accelerate the response, regardless of the physical location of the server. Cloud content distribution has reduced the need for worrying about the physical location of the server. The only kind of industry, which still have to worry about – it is high-frequency trading, where the loss of even microseconds may affect the income directly.

coding Specificity

Site pages to a specific domain of informing the user, the region where the content. However, on its own URL-address is not always accurately shows the search area system. This is especially true for sites that use the top-level URL is the country code domains. Such cases are rare, but that you need to know.To tell search engines the region where the active content, you must implement the code of the country in this part of the site.

Usually, the prescribed special HTML code in the header of each page. Consider again the example of www.mybusiness.com, as the basic version of the site. To direct Google to the French version of the site, you will need to insert between the opening and closing tag <HEAD> the following code: <link rel = “alternate” hreflang = “fr” href = www.mybusiness.com / fr />. This code shows the search engine that the link refers to an alternate version of the page in French. </ HEAD>

It is important to note that there are several variations of the code for each country. You can find them in Google Webmaster Support.

Multilingual sitemap

Creating a multilingual site map is another way of how to help the search engine to the definition of the content of regionality. This method works for both search engines and users, if you configure the card correctly.

The first option – HTML site map. It will be a visible page, which includes links to each separate part of your website or the content. You can create one such page for each language, a little changing your main site map. You will need to use the tag rel = “alternate”, to indicate the alternate language version of the page.

The second option is XML. XML Sitemap is created specifically for the search engines and is not displayed to users. It is a simple list of pages on your site, also using the tag rel = “alternate”, to identify the various language versions of a page.

Why a rel = “alternate”?

You must use the tag rel = “alternate”, primarily for two reasons. Firstly, to tell the Google, what version of the page to show a particular user. Spanish If the user is looking for your site, you want him to see the site in Spanish, and not the English version.

The second reason lies in SEO. Duplicate content is a big problem for webmasters and using rel = “alternate” duplicates can be made legitimate. That is, the search engine will not punish you. In the developing world of e-commerce investment in multi-language sites is a good idea for business development. Using rel = “alternate” You can protect your site from the sanctions.