Are You a Multilingual Marketer?
Are you marketing in just one language? If so, you are missing out on 64.8% of your marketing potential. This is because 64.8% of the world is surfing the internet in a language other than English. By becoming a multilingual marketer, you immediately open up a stream of new markets. Google alone crawls web pages in 35 different languages.
One of the best ways to attract worldwide traffic is to translate your site and register it with both English and foreign-language search engines and directories. Not to mention, the competition in foreign search engines is much less competitive than the search engines of the United States.
Foreign language markets online are currently growing at a much faster rate than English speaking markets. You have the opportunity to tap into this market while it is in an exponential growth phase.
Below is a complete plan to getting your web site translated and into the foreign search engines and directories.
First, you must make a list of all of your keywords in English. These are the phrases that people use to find you in the search engines. You can extract these keywords by going to your web site's statistics program.
To optimize your web site for foreign search engines, you must identify equivalent and related terms in that language. Many of the English keywords may have multiple translations in another language. For example, if you are optimizing your web page around the keyword "socks". You will most likely end up with twice as many search terms in French because there are two common words for socks in the French language: "bas" and "chaussettes".
After you create a list of targeted keywords, you will need to find out which of these search terms are worth pursuing. You can do this by doing some research with Overture and Miva. Both of these pay-per-click search engines offer search suggestion tools in a variety of languages.
Finally, you will need to group the search terms together into similar terms and assign each group to a specific page on your web site.
Step two is to place these translated keywords on your site. There are two ways of doing this.
You can translate each page into a specific language. Once you have all of these pages translated, you will then need to link them all together from your home page. Each of these pages will need to be optimized for your targeted keywords. You do this the same way that you would for an English site. Place your keywords in the title tag, meta keywords tag, and the meta description tag. You'll also want to plug these translated phrases into the body of the text and headlines of your pages, especially the first 200 words.
However, the best way to translate your site is by creating a completely new site for each translation.
Doing this offers a variety of benefit, one of these being the ability to register a country-specific domain for each of your web site translations.
For example, if you currently own www.companyname.com and you are translating into French, it would be appropriate to use www.companyname.fr. This country-specific domain lets the search engines know that you are a French web site.
By setting up a new web site for each language, you will also be entitled to additional directory listings in the country specific Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, and other high–profile web site directories in that language.
Creating multiple sites is also beneficial for your linking campaign. People will be more likely to link to you if your web site is entirely in their language. Because link popularity is such a crucial ranking factor, creating separate web sites would be best for your business.
Step three in our multilingual strategy is to submit your newly translated site to the foreign search engines. Many of the major search engines have regional versions of their web site so that they appeal to visitors in various countries of the world. They include AOL Search, Alta Vista, Excite, FAST Search, Go/Infoseek, Google, HotBot, Lycos, MSN Search, Northern Light, Open Directory, Snap, WebCrawler, and Yahoo.
You can find a complete list of the top foreign language search engines at http://www.allsearchengines.com/foreign.html
Another opportunity that has been opened up by multilingual markets is that of pay-per click search engines.
Using pay-per-click search engines is one of the fastest ways to start funneling targeted traffic to your website. While most of the pay-per-click engines in the United States have been flooded with competition, many of the foreign pay-per-click search engines have untapped opportunities.
English language search terms can often be five-times the cost of Spanish language bids. For example, the keyword phrase "internet marketing" cost $2.09 for the number one position in the English version of Overture. However, if you place an ad in the Spanish version, it would only cost you 50 cents for the very same position.
Keep in mind that when you translate your web site into a different language, you must be able to offer customer support in that language. If you are not fluent in the language yourself, this will be something you need to outsource.
Many web surfers located in countries other than the United States and Canada do not trust web sites as much as Americans and Canadians do. This is largely because the internet was first introduced in English.
Because of this, visitors from other countries will want your online business to have a personal touch. You can do this by providing local contact information and an address in the footer of each of your pages. Your visitors need to know that you are a real person that can be trusted.
If you decide to translate your web site, do not take this task lightly. There are many considerations that must be taken into account. It is important to steer clear from automated tools to translate your site. Instead, use local translators who fully understand how business works in their country and make sure you have local sales staff to support each of your customers.
Your online presence is just as important as that of an offline business. You need a customer support staff that will be available to your customers at all times. You are not just translating your business, you are establishing an online business in that language and a local presence in the country you are targeting.
Kim Roach is the Hip Marketing Gal at http://www.unleashthetraffic.com/traffic/ , where you can learn how to attract targeted web site traffic for free.
Get the best contractors for all your home
It is a major decision to whether to undertake home renovations in your present home or buy or move to a new home altogether. The final decision would be made on a number of factors. You should consider all the options before making any kind of decision. If you have decided to go in for major homerenovations, then, you should definitely consult a design consultant who will work in tandem to decide what is best in your particular situation.
Before you start major home renovations you could seek the advice of an occupational therapist (OT) on the functional needs. The first point to consider would be your home renovations potential. Do the architectural and design layout of your existing home allow for the kind of home renovation you have in mind?
Secondly, your home renovation could also indirectly depend upon your quality of neighbors as if you have good neighbors you may not shift out but go on with your home renovation. Thirdly, if you are undertaking major home renovation, you should keep in mind whether the property rates in your area are in keeping with the increase in value of your property. Fourthly, relocating while home renovation are going on may prove to be a difficult times both emotionally and in terms of cost. Children may find it difficult during times of home renovations to leave school and friends and join elsewhere.
So whenever you wish to undertake home renovation, just visit www.allremodel.com. We offer a wide network of trained, insured, bonded and licensed contractors who are experts in all kinds of remodeling projects.
Getting Your Site Indexed by the Major Search Engines
Part I
This is the first article in a six part series on how you can get indexed in the most important search engines on the internet. These search engines include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Exactseek, and Alexa. These sites cover over 80 percent of the searches done on the internet, so it's well worth the effort to prepare your site correctly, and submit it to these search engines.
Before you do any kind of promotion on the internet, you need to make sure that your site is properly prepared for the search engines. The reason is that the search engines will be the main way that others find you on the internet.
If you haven't optimized your site for the search engines, now is the time to do it.
There are two tools that you can use, that are absolutely free, to optimize your website. Keep in mind that your main focus should be on optimizing individual pages for various keyword terms on your topic.
Good Keywords - http://www.goodkeywords.com - This tool will tell you what others are searching for, as well as how often the search terms are searched for in a month. Windows.
Web CEO - http://www.webceo.com - This software suite will not only help you optimize your pages for the search engines, but it will help you find link partners, as well as keyword terms, and you can use it to submit to other lesser known search engines. Windows and MAC.
It is beyond the scope of this article to teach you how to optimize your site for the search engines. Web CEO contains step by step documentation that will teach you everything you need to know about search engine optimization.
What's important here is that you find out specifically what keywords and keyword phrases searchers are looking for when searching. If you optimize your site for the wrong keyword search terms, either no one will find you, or you will have so much competition, you won't be able to get your site to rank very high.
Most searchers won't go beyond the first three pages of results. Rank below this, and you'll have a tough time being found.
Another important point to remember is that each of the main search engines is different. You can optimize your site for Google, which is the most important search engine right now, but you can optimize your site for indexing in all of the major search engines if you do it right.
Avoid techniques like keyword stuffing, redirect pages that are unrelated to your site, and junk pages. Multiple domains pointing to the same site or a mirror site are a definite no no.
Although there is some debate these days about using other writers' articles because of the duplicate content rule, remember that all of the major search engines are full of duplicate content.
Using articles written by other authors is a great way to provide value to your site visitors, but you will want to write a few of your own articles. By writing your own articles, you can optimize them for your keyword terms, something you can't do with other writers' articles.
When you write your articles, convert them to HTML and then use Web CEO to optimize them for your keyword terms. Make sure you focus on no more than two to three terms per page, or you will have problems optimizing your page. You want your articles to make sense, and you want them to provide value to your readers.
Finally, once you've optimized your site, you'll want to make sure that you submit them to the major search engines. Although there is some debate these days over whether or not this is necessary, the major search engines aren't perfect, and they don't always update properly.
Once you've submitted your sites, you can move on to the next steps in your internet marketing campaign. Resubmit only when you've made major changes to your sites.
Search engine optimization and submission is a long term marketing strategy. Good ranking, as well as good coverage of your site won't happen overnight. It will happen though if you stick to good search engine optimization techniques to improve your site's ranking.
Jinger Jarrett will show you how to market your business, or your writing, on the internet for free. You'll get thousands of dollars in free ebooks, software, and tutorials, when you visit her blog at http://www.askjinger.com
