Site going international

German first, then...

[akaTigger]

I need to know what is required to take our corporate site international. Our first objective is to list in Germany (We have a corporate division there.), then we'll be submitting to other European & Asian SEs. I realize the first step is to get the site translated, which we are doing.

I read the thread "How to cash in on some European traffic," but have more rudimentary questions.

1) Does the HTML need to be translated, as well? (We are translating the text only, at this point.)

2) What about keywords? and ALT tags?

3) Are the SE listing pages in English, or do I need to get someone who knows the language?

Thanks, in advance. (Man - I'm glad I found this forum!)

[louponne]

1) Does the HTML need to be translated, as well?

um, html is html - you couldn't "translate" it even if you wanted to.

2) What about keywords? and ALT tags?

yes, if you want to show up well on most search engines. But according to most of their policies, you'll at least get listed if your page content is in the language of the se.

3) Are the SE listing pages in English, or do I need to get someone who knows the language?

I have never seen a se listing page with foreign language versions. Kind of makes you think they try to discourage foreigners, huh?!

[rcjordan]

I'd suggest that you register a domain for each country where you have (or even plan to have) a corporate division as in .de, .no, etc.

[akaTigger]

Thanks to you, both.

One more question... Can you tell me how the charset tag fits into the picture?

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

[louponne]

<I'd suggest that you register a domain for each country >

I can see this logic from a corparate identity viewpoint, but for the se's, there's really no reason that I can see to multiply domains. All the French se's, at least, don't care at all whether you are .com or .fr

[rencke]

Good Morning akaTigger and welcome to the European Forum.

Louponne and rcjordan have answered your questions while I was sound asleep, but I would like to amplify a bit on the question of domain names. First, I suggest that you read my long answer in this discussion [webmasterworld.com...]

From it, you will see that the machines that are the most important of the local search engines will not concern themselves with the domain, just as louponne has pointed out. They require language only. But the vast majority of all European search engines will not list you at all, unless you have a local domain. Local presence is usually required for a local domain. If you check each of the 35 separate discussions for each country, you can see what applies where.

If your corporation us big and well known, there is not much choice but to go with "corporate_name.com", "corporate_name.de" etc. But if it is not well known, then you will gain additional bost in rankings if you register a generic dot-come in the local language. Again, see my reply to Benj linked above.

Avoid multi language sites and put each language into a separate domain. This will make submissions easier as you can then submit just the index-page and eliminates the chance of directories mistaking you for non-local language. Otherwise, you will be forced into an index page that offers nothing but language choice and no text and that could be disastrous for you efforts to be found.

About the character set tag: When you do pages in a.o. Russian, Greek and Asian languages, the editor will automatically put something else in there to tell the browser what character set to use.

[akaTigger]

Thanks, Rencke...

I was planning on a multi language site, but hadn't considered how that would effect search engine submission. I'll break it into separate sites.