Promoting website to foreign language countries

dwaned

Hi all,

Ok, my site is doing pretty well in Google and I'm confident I can keep it up there. Now, the site is in English and I have a google translator built in. I want to keep the site in English but I want it to be found better in Greek, Russian and Romanian searches.

Anyone got any idea how to go about this? Without translating the entire site? I need to keep it English as all contact must be made in English.

Any advice appreciated..

DwaneD

tomED

The simple answer is translate the site.. don't try cut corners it never works!

dwaned

Thanks tomED,

So run the site in the languages I want on the same domain? My real concern is communications after contact as they would have to be carried out in a maximum of two languages. From experience the robot translators really don't work very well on a professional level.

Thanks for your input though, I will consider it.

mneylon

Register domains that cover the target countries

You could provide basic info in those languages and note that the translation is being provided simply as a courtesy ..

If you're looking for translators try http://www.proz.com for freelancers

dwaned

Thanks Blacknight, I'll have a good look into that.

tomED

dwaned wrote: »

Thanks tomED,

So run the site in the languages I want on the same domain? My real concern is communications after contact as they would have to be carried out in a maximum of two languages. From experience the robot translators really don't work very well on a professional level.

Thanks for your input though, I will consider it.

It really comes down to what you are trying to achieve. For example, are you trying to get to the top for the translated phrases or are you trying to show a presence in those countries?

If it's the latter, go the route that Blacknight suggests - if however you just want to be found for those keyphrases, research your target keyphrases and see what the competition is like. The likelihood is that it will be pretty low (depending of course of your are of expertise), so therefore rather than having to promote 3 or 4 different domain names, you could use the authority already built up by for your existing domain name.

We recently went the geo-targeting route for a client (ie presence in different countries) using subdomains... e.g. fr.domain.com, it.domain.com and used Google's Webmaster Tools to geo-target them to the specific country. We translated all content too and this has been hugely successful.

Key point is - decide whether you are targeting keyphrases or country first, then worry about how you are going to achieve it.