Optimising technical content for international audience

Feb 15
08:12

2013

Sadhiv Mahandru

Sadhiv Mahandru

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Structuring your website is very important for international SEO when you have different languages and localisations of your content and there are some technical things you can do to your pages to help search engines find and understand the different internationalised sections of your website.

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Structuring your website is very important for international SEO when you have different languages and localisations of your content and there are some technical things you can do to your pages to help search engines find and understand the different internationalised sections of your website. 

First determining where to place your translated content is an important step. There are some organisations that structure their multi-lingual websites by placing different translations in different sub-domains. For example,Optimising technical content for international audience Articles you might place your Spanish version of the site on es.yourdomain.com. Other websites will place the content in different subfolders like yourdomain.com/es. Both methods are effective in establishing a different form of content dedicated to a certain language. And they both have risks and advantages. 

Well using different sub domains allows you freedom in implementation since it can be considered a completely different website. It also brings the risk of not taking advantage of the overall link value of your main domain. Using subfolders to house your multi lingual content eliminates this risk and it brings the full strength of your domain to bear. But it may be challenging to implement different site frameworks this way depending upon how your e-commerce platform a setup. 

Next, make sure to explicitly to tell search engines what language and region the content is targeted to using hreflang link tags on your pages. These tags will tell a search engine where each internationalize version of the page lives by specifying each of the URL along with the language in-country targets. So if you have one version of your page in English and another in French, you can put these two tags on both pages specifying which URLs house each piece of content. And you can be more specific by adding country targets as well. If you had one version of the page targeted to French speaking Canadians for example you could modify this tag to include both the language and the country code. 

When it's all said and done the best SEO Manchester UK will be able to properly identify what audience each page is targeted to and display the most relevant results in the different geo targeted search engines. Also be sure to use rel canonical tags on each language specific version of your content pages. This can be especially important when you have similar content targeted two different countries within the same languages. You can avoid duplication problems by explicitly calling out the unique URL of each piece of content in each language.  

As long as you determine a scale of all structure to house you different international content and you apply the appropriate location, language and canonical tags, search engines will have an easy you a to determine which languages in countries each of your content pages are intended to serve. And this will help get the most relevant and appropriate pages of your site in each of the language specific search results.