Translating Your Website into Multiple Languages
By Peter Boyd on June 6, 2011 in SEO
A question from one of our law firm clients:
We now have an attorney and a paralegal who speak Spanish. We would like for our website to be seen by Spanish speakers either here or in South America. What needs to be done? Does the whole site need to be translated or is it just search terms that need to be added in Spanish?
Great! Yes, we would need to create an “En Español” version of the website. There are a few ways to do this:
Auto Translate
Google has an auto translate tool available for free use and it can be integrated in an hour or so of work. It is not a perfect translation, but those on a budget can take advantage of having almost all languages ready to use.
I typically recommend this for clients who just want their site automatically translated for actual use. These pages are not SEO friendly, as you are making a virtual copy of the webpage and not really making a new site that is indexed. But it does get the job done in a pinch.
Translate in Full
Ideally, you would translate the website manually through a translation service company. Some of our clients start with just a few pages; others jump in for a full translation of the entire website.
The more you translate, the better for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes, as you will have more pages of content in that language. You would need to do the title tags and meta description, as well as get Spanish anchor text links back to your site to rise high in the rankings for Spanish terms, if SEO is a factor.
An example of a well done translation is here – http://www.theorlandolawyers.com/ and http://www.theorlandolawyers.com/language/ . As you will see, everything is translated: the menus, headlines, text, title tags and more. We literally build a new site, and often we create that site on a new domain that contains Spanish keyword phrases.
A simple translation is also here – http://www.ybzlaw.com/ and http://www.ybzlaw.com/language/ . You will see that not every page is translated.
We always recommend a manual translation. It gives the owner full control of the translation, usually in a more refined reading style. Moreover, the site benefits from being able to be indexed and SEO’d.
