Language
Translation
If you have a business
that is looking to pick up foreign customers, then as well as appearing
on regional search engines, you may need to translate your website.
Given the predominance of US web sites, whilst the english speaking
market is big - it is also fiercely competitive. If you site can be
found and viewed in (say) German, French, Spanish and Japanese - you
are still hitting large and wealthy markets, but there will be less
competition.
There are 2 points
to consider:
a) to get found
in a foreign language you may have to translate your target keywords,
file names, meta tags etc, and introductory text, and submit to regional
search engines
b) to get the customer
to purchase, make contact etc, you may also have to provide translations
of the guts of your website
The best solution
will be to get professional translation by native speakers. Try Arthur
International.
You can easily offer
a very simple translation service online. You can put a link into your
site to guide your visitors to Babelfish
(by Altavista). There, your visitors can paste in a section of text
or a web page URL and get a translation. Its not perfect, but it may
help.
If you can score
well on Google, then users there
can translate pages into other languages. Clearly you still rely on
being found - which will depend on what language they search in.
