SEO and Website Localization: What You Need to Know
While we can’t emphasize enough the importance of having your website available in other languages, one important and overlooked fact is that website localization also transforms how your website is crawled by online search engine such as Bing and Google. If you’ve spent any amount of time optimizing SEO on your website, you’ll know how important it can be to your rankings in search results. So how can you ensure that whatever optimizations you’ve made in your original site carry over to the foreign-language versions?
The best way to preserve SEO in a localized website is to create a one-to-one list of every page in your site and after that look up each corresponding localization prior to serving the web page to users. Then it’s simply a matter of serving the full, localized page directly from your server, as-is. Most content management systems and frameworks should have built-in support for this technique, and it assures your content stays under your control, and is not dependent on third-party domain redirects or other application dependencies.
To make translation even simpler, consider some of our partners like Ackuna and Translation Cloud.
If you are less technically apt, you can use some javascript techniques like the ConveyThis, which is a great solution for allowing more access for international visitors, but does not provide any SEO benefits due to the translated content being generated and accessed via third-party sites via javascript (and therefore not available as static content for web crawlers to access).
Interested in translating your website, yet uncertain where to start? Contact us today!
