More and more companies and entrepreneurs are striving to create a multilingual website for their business needs – whether that’s in order to expand into other countries, or be able to communicate with clients in multiple languages.
This is increasing competition, as companies are now competing in both the local and international market.
When designing a multilingual website you must also plan for the further promotion of your project in search engines, and to design the site according to important SEO optimization guidelines.
There are several basic methods for website design in different languages, which we will talk about today, and we will also explore what the best solution is for multilingual website design for different industries.
Which CMS is best?
Your first decision is to choose a Content Management System (CMS). I would recommend going with an open source CMS, rather than a custom one, as these have thousands of developers all working to improve them and it means that if your initial developer isn’t available for a project in the future, you can always find a different develop to implement any additional changes.
WordPress, Drupal, and PrestaShop are all good CMS systems for multilingual sites and I would recommend any of these, as they all allow you to create a site in English then easily translate it into multiple other languages using existing plugins and a shared database.
How to configure your multilingual site
The primary method to configure a multilingual website are in one of the following ways:
• Creating separate sites on different domain names (site.com for English, site.fr for French, site.de for German, etc.);
• Creating 1 site and using separate subdomains (en.site.com, fr.site.com, de.site.com);
• Creating the website in categories/folders (site.com/en, site.com/fr, site.com/de).
There are successful international websites that use all 3 of the above strategies. If you have a keyword rich domain name (e.g. scottishweddingceremony.co.uk), rather than a brand name, then you’re best using a complete separate domain name for the foreign language versions of your site, in order to make sure it makes sense to them.
Google will also put .fr’s higher in France, .de’s higher in Germany, etc. so using country specific domains gives you this advantage.
Creating a language version on a separate domain or subdomain can be achieved in one of two ways:
• Setting up a server to process a subdomain as a language parameter (within a single site), in the administrative part there are pages with fields for different languages. Drupal, WordPress and PrestaShop all allow you to do this, whether you’re using a separate domain or subdomain and this is the preferred option if content is similar on different sites (e.g. an ecommerce website).
• Copying a site into physical folders of the subdomains or separate domains – in this case, each website is separated and independent from each other.
From an SEO optimization point of view, the process of implementing multi-language sites on subdomains or separate domains is practically identical. This method is used by the large portals and Internet hypermarkets. Sometimes the subdomains are rendered by local sections or large parts of online stores.
The only difference in cost with separate domains if you use the same database with a language parameter is that you have to renew the domain each year. This is typically only a few dollars / euros, so isn’t significant compared to the potential SEO benefit.
For help with website translation and multilingual SEO on your site, visit https://www.indigoextra.com/.
Remember to translate Metatags, URLs and Messages
When you translate your website for optimal SEO and user-experience, it’s essential to also remember to translate the following:
• Metatag Title – The title of the page that appears in search results
• Metatag Description – The description that also appears in search results
• URL – The web address of the page
• Automated messages – Any automated messages saying ‘your product has been sent’, ‘out of stock’, etc.
The first 3 are all important for your SEO and automated messages ensure that customers know what’s happening after they’ve ordered a product, or when they visit your site.
What about Google Translate?
There are certain ways to implement the multilingual versions of your website via Google Translate. It allows you to create a site in one language and translate it each time you access a particular link. However, to create a full version of the website in another language, this method is far from ideal as the translation will be flawed, sometimes even unreadable or hilarious and Google also consider an automatic translation to be spam, so the translated version of your site won’t rank at all well in the search results.
Adapting the design to the local culture
It’s important to research the local culture for each country you’re entering and ensure:
• Any brand names in the local language don’t mean something else in that language, or sound like they mean something else in that language. There are lots of examples where companies have got this wrong, normally in the world of automobile manufacture for some reason.
• The colour scheme resonates well with that culture.
• You take into account local quirks, for example in Germany it’s considered bad luck to wish someone, “Happy
Birthday” before their birthday. In France they tend to like reassurance that you have certification and it’s more common to add logos of authorising bodies, or even credit cards accepted predominantly on the home page, about us page, or in the footer of your site.
Conclusion
For best results manually translate your site with an experienced translator and creating a separate domain for each language, either using your brand as the domain name, or a localised keyword.
Use a CMS that has existing multilingual functionality to allow you to use a shared database for each language.
