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For the main concepts a good approach is having a look at local Yahoo e Dmoz and other top searchengines (Altavista for example: try searching Sport on it.altavista and you can see correlate arguments/directories..): from their directories you can have an idea about the main keywords .
When you have a list of targeted keywords in German or Italian or whatever, you should use Copernic, the full version.
Try a search in the targeted nation with several keywords.
Quickly you will discover competitive sites: having a look at their Html META you can have an idea about the best keywords to target.
Maybe some of your competitors have the site in different languages: see how they did etc.
Ideally, the translator should have access to a keyword database in the language and so be able to pick the best phrases in the local language. But now, we are talking about translation + SEO, which is a more expensive solution. However, if you want a top notch job, that is the way to go.
On the other hand, competition is so much lighter in non-English languages, that merely good SEO-practice will do the job in most cases. If I were you, I would start with just a straight forward and inexepensive translation of body text + title, description and keywords and see where this gets me. You can either do the HTML markup yourself, pouring the translated paragraphs into a template one by one (underline link text in the English manuscript so you know where to put the links in the translated version. Or you can opt for the translator to provide HTML. The latter will cost more of course.
Angiolo:
I looked at Copernic, but they have several products and I could'nt figure out which one you meant. Can you explain a bit more fully what the program does and how you use it?
the free version
the paid version
The paid version is:
Copernic 2000 Pro
(Maybe now is 2001 pro)
In the the "Pro" version you can do a meta search, specifying the search engine "language".
Meta search on these search engines:
Italian
Australian
Canadian
British
French
Spanish
German
Portuguese
In addition you can search for
email
newsgroup
music
images
etc.
For example for the italian, Copernic will search on these engines (italian version):
Altavista
Arianna
Euroseek
Excite
Fast
Google
HotBot
Il trovatore
Katalogo
Lycos
Msn
Ragno italiano
Snap
Tiscalinet
Virgilio
Yahoo
I think that Copernic is good to find sites that are doing a good SEO.
Angiolo - thanks. What is the url for Copernic.
I'm not quite sure what your saying it does. Is it a tool to deliver comparitive key words?
That is an important question and you picked a daunting example. A good translation should be idiomatic rather than direct. The word "coaching" is an American concept, which does not lend itself easily to translation. In fact "coach" and "coaching" have been borrowed into some European languages for that reason (Swedish among them). For a good translation into any language, the translator needs to grasp what lies within the concept and then find the proper word(s) to convey that content into the target language. At times, that can be quite a challenge.
Generally, the task is simple if the keyword needs no translation at all, e.g. Fort Lauderdale, golf, tennis, hotel, restaurant etc. And difficult if concepts unique to one culture have to be translated for another. Luckily, good SEO is so little known in Europe that you can probably make it to page one just on the basis of that fact alone.
English is the only language in the world (or one of them, I'm no linguist) that doesn't use inverted word order.
I would be happy to teach all of you these lines if you would like! ;)
What about when the english is technical, actually very technical electronics for example.
I see Europe as a big potential market place, what would be the most cost effective approach, as i would happily do the webdesign, however i have no knowledge of French and German, Dutch or any of the Scandanavian languages.
Hence i would be looking for Translations, and SEO for possible several languages.
