One of the major benefits in running a multilingual site is appearing high on Google search results in different languages. The process of promoting your site to the top is called SEO and when it’s happening on a multilingual site, we call it “multilingual SEO”.
Just to get a few things out of the way before we get started. There is no magic here, no tricks and no shortcuts. We can’t pay our way to the top and we can’t take shortcuts. We can follow good practices and use good tools to achieve our goals and get visitors from all over the world to visit our site and buy our things.
In this tutorial, we’ll review the objectives, tools and best practices for multilingual SEO.
SEO Basics – How it Works and What we Should Expect
Imagine for a second that you’re the all mighty Google. You get billions of people looking for different things 24hs per day. You have to pick 10 sites from the entire Internet and show them on the first page for every search.
There are hundreds of millions of web pages for you to pick just 10 items for and you need to do that in a split second.
When we think about it this way, we understand that everything is automated and there’s nobody to talk with. We cannot pay to have our site appear higher. So, any SEO or web development first that guarantees #1 place on Google search results is selling you nothing but air. At best.
So, back to Google. If you were Google, how would you tell what 10 pages to show for a search results? The answer is surprisingly simple and also explains to us what we need to do in our SEO work.
Look for pages that talk about the subject of the search – obviously, the page must focus on the specific subject. If we are looking for ‘cat food’, a good page will include a wealth of information about ‘cat food’. If it talked about ‘pet food’ and briefly mentions ‘cat food’, that page is a lot less interesting to Google than a page that talks specifically about ‘cat food’.
Look for pages that belong to websites that talk about the topic – if you have a page about ‘cat food’, but it’s part of a site that talks about ‘auto parts’, Google will assume that you are not the world’s biggest authority on cat food. However, if the page belongs to a site that talks about pet food and mentions cat food in a dozen other places, linking to that ‘cat food’ page, Google knows that this site may be relevant for ‘cat food’ searches.
Look for pages that other sites consider as authority – this is the tricky part in all this game, but it’s also the one that comes very naturally, in time. Google cannot go and interview a billion people, asking their opinion about hundreds of millions of websites. But it can ‘interview’ other websites and see which sites they are referring to. When Google sees a link from one site to the other, it considers this link as a vote of trust. It assumes that placing a link means you recommend people to read quality information in another site. Of course, many people try to exploit this by buying links or creating misleading content on their other sites, but Google’s algorithms are pretty smart and are not easily fooled.
So, if this is what Google does to find those best 10 pages to show as search results, what should we do to be one of those pages?
- Produce high quality content.
- Stay focused. The narrower, the better.
- Promote our content to others, so that they know about it and will link to it, if they truly appreciate it.
Is this simple, or what?
How to Explain your Content to Google
Now that we know what we need to do, let’s talk about how we do it. Let’s agree that we are writing great content. Our purpose when we talk about SEO is to make sure that Google also understands it.
When Google reads our site, it looks at it a little differently than we see the site in a browser.
Google doesn’t care about fancy design, fonts, colours, animation and images. When Google reads your site, all it sees is the content and the HTML that goes around the text.
Source: Wpml
