This is a pretty good guest post. If you have an ecommerce website I suggest that you look into targeting other languages to increase your sales.
The fundamentals of launching a simple, useful and user-friendly business web portal don’t take a great deal of time to master.
Some budding business owners may be naturals at it, whilst others may opt to farm out specific elements of the setting-up process, especially with aspects requiring some coding knowledge or significant insight into complex technical Web applications.
Regardless of what route a business takes towards developing its website, it’s essential to remember that the design part is just a small element of the process…the maintenance and management of the site is crucial too,
Moreover, there’s little point having a beautiful website that meticulously reflects all your business offerings, if nobody in the online community can find your site. And this is why you also have to market your website accordingly, to ensure your key target audience can find your site among the millions of other websites on the World Wide Web: identifying how to maximize your visibility on a very crowded internet should be a key consideration.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective internet marketing tools available to 21st century businesses and is an art worth mastering. There are a number of key steps that business owners can take to make sure their company’s website ranks highly on search engines for their industry’s most relevant key search terms, which are: on-page optimization (include keywords on your company website), link-building (get links to your website from ‘trusted’ websites) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
This would make for a full-on article in itself. From an international standpoint, however, there are a few factors you must consider in addition to the above.
Firstly, you must buy a locally hosted domain name in the target country. It may just be your company name with a local domain extension, for example .at in Austria or .nl in the Netherlands. From an SEO perspective, the location of your web hosting company is crucial as search engines use this data along with other factors such as domain extensions when determining overall search engine rankings in a specific country. Your web host’s server should be located in your target country, so be sure to ask this before committing.
This lays the foundation for you to translate your website into the desired language; however, there is a strong argument that says you shouldn’t translate the keywords. And here’s why.
A correct translation of a keyword isn’t necessarily what people use to search for services/products locally; they may use abbreviations, colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing. So in the same way as you identify your industry’s highest ranking keywords for the English market, such as via Google’s free keyword finder, you have to research the keywords for each target country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimized.
Once you have your keywords identified for each country, you can then incorporate these into a professionally translated website. It’s important that native speakers are used to translate your website as it must exude professionalism in all your target markets.
English may still be the dominant language in terms of content on the Web, but the majority of the world’s internet users’ first language isn’t English. And this disparity creates a rather lucrative opportunity for those seeking to enter new markets: the competition for key search terms is much less on the non-English language internet, therefore it’s possible to achieve high search engine rankings far easier than in English.
So there’s a lot to consider when looking to market yourself to the international community. Building a quality website is one thing; but managing, maintaining and marketing it is another thing altogether and should be factored into any enterprise’s online strategy.
About the author
Christian Arno is founder and Managing Director of Lingo24, a global translation company that specializes in website localization.
With over a hundred full-time members of staff working across four continents, and a network of 4,000 translators across the globe, Lingo24 has clients in over sixty countries and translated over 33 million words in the past twelve months. They are on course for a turnover of $6m USD in 2009.
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This stream of income is worth the $10 per month! If anything, watch this video and set yourself up. You can promote the SpiderWeb System AND GDI separately.
Very nice post indeed. Business localization online is way to do it in these days of crazy and big market competition.
The process by which a web-spinning spider makes a “sketch” of a web design beforemaking the permanent web.
How do I stop a spider from continually spinning a web in the same place?
Webmaster must host his website in the local server of targeted country. For example, if you want to target UK then your website must be hosted at UK based IP address.
You don’t necessarily need to host it locally. The language should be enough to grab visitors in the SE’s
For those interested, I do all of my sites in CakePHP. It makes multilingual and internationalization a breeze.
http://book.cakephp.org/view/161/Internationalization-Localization