UK Companies who want Mainland European business from Natural Search have Much to Consider

Using foreign language tags on web pages will help to improve search engine optimisation (SEO), according to a leading industry expert.

Foreign keywords are often picked up by search engines such as Google, which offer an auto-translate function to ensure they are still useful to users that may not speak the language, claims SEO expert Sam Tilson, of Memorybits.co.uk.

He added: "For this reason [for example] SEOs will have to take into account the fact that their sites could gain additional traffic if they enable their search to be found in China."

However, Mr Tilson explained that it may not suit every type of website business.

"E-commerce and advertising driven sites may not want their sites to be viewed by foreign traffic as it is not possible for them to purchase," he added.

Mr Tilson was responding to Google's launch of its new polyglot translation service, which enables webpages to be translated in-browser.

Living Streams comment:  Browsers in use across Europe have the facility for users to search own country only or even own language only.  The answer to the former is duplicate websites in different languages each hosted in the the relevant country with the country specific domain name (very expensive).  The answer to the latter is a segmented website where the visitor chooses the language and this steers them to the pages in their language.  It must also be born in mind when targeting countries such as China that different search engines may dominate those markets (not necessarily Google).

Source: Download Squad