Tips to Optimize Multi-language Websites

A multi-language website is often very helpful when your business targets a larger demographic with people speaking and of course understanding different languages. If you are writing about soccer in Brazil, there is no harm in writing it in Portuguese. But, if you want to pen something related to soccer in Latin America, Argentines can also like to relate to your story. In that case, it will be stupidity to select your language not keeping the wide demographic of the football fans of South America in mind. Multilingual websites often fulfill the requirement in addressing a larger group scattered in different parts of the world. Optimizing multilingual website is no rocket science to bother the webmasters. Some careful and smart moves can keep your site on the top of the search engine.

Optimize URL Structure: If you want to make Google understand how important your website is to a particular nation, it is always advisable to take the pain of having independent sites dedicated completely to that particular nation. Google prefers dedicated domains for the sites for different nations and people speaking different languages. Amazon is among the ecommerce sites who understood this smart way of doing business and that certainly went in favor of the profit they reap out of it. In Germany, they are known as amazon.de while, people in the United Kingdom know them as amazon.co.uk.

Rely on an International SEO Tool: It is difficult to optimizing your Multi-language website without having a SEOprofiler account. As an owner of a multi-language site it is your responsibility to create your own SEOprofiler account.

Character Encoding: Google extracts encodings from content and the HTTP header. Google usually recognize all sorts of character encodings. Still, all multi-language site owners are recommended to use UTF-8 if and when possible.

Language Recognition by Google: Google often detects the major language of a particular webpage. So, it is never a good idea to test its efficiency by publishing texts for different parts of the page in different language. Header, sidebars, menu and other sections of a particular page should be in the same language.