SEO comes before translation

August 12th, 2008 Amir Posted in Guides, Website tips |

When you translate your website, you’re actually duplicating its contents in multiple languages. So, it’s a good idea to fix it up before doing that. The first major fixup you should do is to make your site clearer for search engines – the fancy name for this is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Think spider!

Search engines go from one page to the other, following links. They use computer programs called “spiders” to do that. These programs do their best to understand every page, in order to deliver correct results when people do searches.
If you make it easy on these spiders, they’ll understand you better and be able to show your website in relevant searches.

Speak the spiders’ language

Spiders read HTML. That’s the language of the web. HTML uses tags to describe different parts of the page. For example:

If you build your page with tables and place text in images, this is what it may look like for spiders:

Welcome to our home page
|| Products || Download || Order || Support
IMG is a great image
converter tool
IMG

What do you make of it? Not much, do you?

You can create the same page using an <h1> header and list. Then, it would look like this for the spiders:

= Image Conversion Software =
 * Products
 * Download
 * Order
 * Support
ImageVerter is a great image converter tool. Download now!

That’s a bit better, isn’t it?

The page would look the same, but now, it’s built with tags that convey information. I used the heading (h1) tag to tell what the page heading is, used a list for the main sections and avoided placing text inside images. When a spider sees this page, it knows what I’m talking about and can deliver it when people search for image conversion tools.

• Put descriptive text in your page’s <title> <h1> and <h2> tags.
• Look at your page without style sheets and images and see that it’s still clear.

Include texts that people might be looking for

You can use a keyword research tool to find what people are looking for. Normally, people already have a pretty good idea what their main keywords would be – without doing much research, but some digging around will probably reveal search terms you didn’t think about.
For example, if you’re thinking about ‘digital photos’ than a keyword research tool would probably also suggest ‘digital picture’ and ‘digital photograph’.
If you include different keyword alternatives in your text, search engines will spot them and can show your page for these searches.
A few years ago people obsessed about keyword density. Magical numbers flew in the air, speculating what would work best. As search engines get more and more intelligent, you can (and probably should) write your web copy in conversational language and avoid over stuffing them with keywords.

Keep pages focused on a single topic

This isn’t really a tip for Search Engine Optimization. Your visitors would appreciate it if every page talked about a single thing and presented it with as few words as possible.
Search engines need to understand what the page is all about. If you’ve got a page about Fly Fishing and you’re adding a whole paragraph about your Safari Tours, you’re just confusing everyone. Keep one page talking about your fishing expeditions and another on the safari tours. Each page would be short on on-topic.

What Google says about it

Google publishes plenty of good reading on SEO. You can start with this article on creating a Google-friendly site.

What’s your experience?

Do you do your SEO yourself, or is a professional doing it for you?
Tell us about how it’s going!