Welcome to (your non-English speaking country here), where the weather’s great and the tourism flourishes. Speaking of tourism, are you preparing to drive traffic to your international website? If it’s not going like you thought, check a few things on the technical side to help improve your visibility with international SEO.
Put the Language in the Meta. ID your language in the global meta tag. This is an easy way to specify the main language of your content:
<META Name=”content-language” Content=”FR”>
Don’t Just Translate. Performing an exact translation of your website through Google or other tools isn’t always the way to go. Most people go this route to get ranked on international SERPs, but try to avoid making these tools your solution: exact English translations of other languages don’t make sense in many instances.
Link Up with Your Region. Common SEO knowledge will tell you the more hyperlinks coming to your site, the better the ranking, so apply the same science with your region and ensure other international domains are linking to your site.
Host Is Where the Heart Is. If possible, keep your hosting inside the country you’re localizing for. Search engines recognize IP addresses automatically — it never hurts to have those addresses defining the proper location.
Define Your Domain. For example: when I build out my Austrian/German site is it www.premiereglobal.com/de or www.premiereglobal.at/de/? I linked off to the second in this case. If you’re a big brand or corporation with enough presence in the country, you’ll want to use it in your TLD (top-level domain). For smaller companies, it’s more practical to use the subfolder in your domain and geo-target the respective pages.
Take these pointers and run with them for visibility. Soon folks will be linking, sharing and talking about your brand’s site in more languages than you can think of.