Best way to go about multi-lingual, multi-country ecommerce?

[Karma]

I developed a software product recently that sells OK. At the moment, the software is in English and obviously so is the website (.com).

If I were to make the application multi-lingual - what would be the best way to go about making the website appear in non-English search engines?

Would it simply be a case of getting each page translated and adding a language parameter to the end of page? E.g mydomain.com/?lang=spa

Obviously if I went down this route, I'm not sure what I'd do regarding multi-lingual support of the software as I only speak English.

I have a full-time job and don't have the budget to hire people.

Thoughts?

[mattia]

Karma,
It is a real tricky thing to do to have a multi-language website.
I mean from the Search Engines point of view.
if you want to rank high for both english and let say french keywords you will need to work almost double.

Not impossible, just more challenging.
1/ get a shopping cart (like the one we use) that is multi-languages and also multi-languages for SEO (page titles, meta tags, ...)
2/ place a clear indication on your website that the software is only supported in english.
3/ On each page, place a real link to the home page of the other language, so each language can be easily crawled by SEs (drop down menu selector often do not get crawled by SEs)

best,
Marc

[The_Grunt]

Howdee,

If you get a chance to read through these, they might be helpful to you:

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[google.com...]

[enigma1]

I would use sub-domains for the links exposure not parameters.
en.example.com
fr.example.com
sp.example.com

Then use the same database for content and create separate tables according to language to differentiate among them. When the language changes you access the associated tables. It will be easier to manage from a single admin end. If you use a template/theme you probably have to make it dynamic enough to support multilingual strings and headers via a database or string files.