European Search Engine Beginner

Help Required

[Great1]

Hi all, I work for company that runs a hotel directory for UK hotels. We are currently thinking of operating in different languages in a bid to attract the foreign market. Basically I'd like some advice on how and where to start. I've read some of the discussions here, and although they are useful, they present a lot of questions. If anyone would like to see the site I'm looking to use, please email me.

Thanks in advance.

[heini]

Welcome Great1
If your company is serious about going european Iīm afraid there is no easy way. All countries are different. There are some major paths through this diverse landscapes though, which are outlined in the European SEO strategy primer [webmasterworld.com] and in Europe overview [webmasterworld.com].
For everything else the country specific discussions should help.
The question is how far are you willing to go?
It shouldnīt be too difficult to to position your company very good for all languages and countries if you go all the way, meaning:
good sites/subdomains for every language, implying SEO knowledgeable translations
local people to help you getting into the important directories and SEs

[henki]

Welcome to WmW. I would suggest that you first see to that your pages are properly translated. Test them on natives to check that they are OK.

Then my best tips is then to hire a consultant to help you into the right directories and search engines.

There are many factors to concider when marketing to non english speakers. E.g. in Germany you spell substantives with an initial capital letter. Searches are therefore more often made with a capital.

[Great1]

Thanks for the advice guys. I was thinking of starting with one language, probably Spanish. First I'd get the site translated, next I'd registered www.mysite.es and host it on a Spanish server. Then, I'd submit it to Spanish search engines.

Please let me know if I'm missing anything.

[heini]

Do you have the KWs already?

[Great1]

Yeah, I already have Keywords. I've been attacking the major search engines for about a couple of years, so I already have everything setup in English.

I think the trouble will be understanding how other Nationalities search. For example, our main keywords are "hotels in blah blah". I don't know if French people would search for "hôtels dans blah blah".

I realise that I'll have to hire either someone from France, or someone that speaks French fluently. I don't think that would go down to well with the powers that be.

[heini]

Thatīs what I had in mind, didnīt mean to doubt you having english KWs :)

[henki]

Even if you have a tight budget, there are loads of online translators. Cheapest might be to look at ebay, guru or any of those sites.

[Great1]

I think it's more the fact that we have an awful lot of pages the be translated (1000's), and the time involved would be amazing.

I a French person use a French Search Engine to find hotels in the UK, or would they use a UK search engine??

[Rumbas]

>there are loads of online translators

In deed. Good way of starting out if you don't have the cash to spend on professional translations - maybe some of the guys here would even proof read a couple of pages for you. The many WebmasterWorld members cover most known languages and have the SEO understanding too.

I've seen it done for the cost of a few cold beers ;)

[Great1]

I think it's more the fact that we have an awful lot of pages the be translated (1000's), and the time involved would be amazing.

I wonder, would a French person use a French Search Engine to find hotels in the UK, or would they use a UK search engine??

[henki]

They would most defintly search in a French search engine. :)
As spanish people search in spanish SEs.

Even people in the UK prefer UK search engines, even though they fully understand american english. Specially when searching for fotball, fags, financial services etc.

[agerhart]

Great1,

Please let me know how things go with the translation and who you use, as I am toying with the idea for one of my clients.

[Great1]

mmmm, good point. Although personally I use the major search engines for my searching (except when searching for football, because you just get American football).

[Great1]

Will do Agerhart. It might be a while off yet. We're also toying with the idea of the far Eastern search engines. We know someone who speaks fluent Japanese, so I'll let everyone know how that goes.

In the mean time, has anyone tried the far Eastern market, I'd love to hear from you.

[Eric_Jarvis]

I'm in a different line of business (suicide prevention)...we have a multilingual site

competition in languages other than English is much less intense...so we've found that as long as it is kept simple and the translation is top quality, then it is just a matter of submitting the site and watching the new traffic build up

we don't go live with Japanese until teh new year...but Arabic has become one of our most active translations, and though Chinese took a while to get going it is now becoming very busy

it takes time to get into the mindset to submit successfully in a new language...but if you can think in the right way babelfish is sufficient to negotiate your way round the SEs and directories

[rencke]

A very belated welcome to Great1 from the moderator. (Wow, is this forum working when I turn my back, or is it working when I turn my back?)

My reason for being so late is that I started a script on my office machine to sort a 400Mb keyword database today at 1 pm local time. Figured it would take an hour or so. It sucked all the cream out of the machine, leaving room only for solitaire. Surfing was out of the question. After 3 hours, I figured there couldn't be more than a few more minutes, and so waited. After 5 hours I figured there couldn't be more than a few more minutes, and so waited. After 7 hours I figured there couldn't be more than a few more minutes, and so waited. Left office at 8:30 pm with the script still running and smoke coming from the hard disk. Typing this from home.

It looks to me as if all your questions have been answered, Great1. An idea:

You say the site has thousands of pages. This could of course become VERY expensive. But if we are talking of hotel descriptions, there is probably a limited amount of words and phrases used to describe them. If there is a good standardized fact-sheet like structure, maybe a script could handle all or most of the translations on the fly, using the English original as the database? Just an idea. Take a look at how big the variation really is.

Remember also, German is the #1 language in Europe on the web (23% of the European online population have that as their first language, more than even English.) France is a bit down on the list. You'll get all that tomorrow when I publish the third quarterly update of "WmW's European SEO strategy primer." (I didn't twiddle my thumbs all day today.)

And yes: The French would definitely use their favourite French search engine and search for pages in French on UK hotels. No question about it.

[caine]

Rencke,

I look forward to the 3rd edition avidly, just sorting out budget concerns for the .com sites in varying languages, but i will be concentrating on Spanish and German.

So will probably continue, some of the conversations from the pubconference.

[rcjordan]

>Wow, is this forum working
>
Yes, it is working. Nice thread guys!

Welcome to WmW, Great1... and that's a good nick, too.

[Great1]

I like your thinking rencke. If that could be done, it would save a lot of time and expense. The only problem I see (I have a very basic understanding of German, a little better of French) is that there are more than 1 variation for some words in every language, and it's more than likely that somewhere the translation will get confused.

[rencke]

Send me a sticky with the url of the hotel site, and I'll have a look-see later today.

[Marcia]

>don't have the cash to spend on professional translations

And for other budget-conscious considerations, like domain names and hosting, rencke provided a list of options in this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Rumbas]

>You'll get all that tomorrow when I publish the third quarterly update of "WebmasterWorld's European SEO strategy primer."

Did the PC collapse under the keyword database sorting or should we just sit tight and await the 3rd Gold Jaw Dropper SEO strategy primer?

If it is anything like the 2 first, WebmasterWorld members should expect nothing short of a fantastic Euro SEO post!

[rencke]

The post was too big - 19,5k so the posting mechanism didn't swallow it. After some confusion Brett asked me late last night to split it into two. Now, just hold you breath for a few more minutes and wonders are about to happen. (Why not use the time to put more paper into your printer?)

[rencke]

I have not forgotten your problem Great1, just been extremely busy as you have been able to see from elsewhere in this forum. I took a look at your site and immidiately noticed one thing: I have never seen it before, in spite of the fact that I was looking frantically in Google for a truly comprehensive UK hotel index back in June. Wish I had found you.

The reason is that Google hasn't indexed your content. I pasted a whole sentence from one of your pages into Google and that should have brought your site to the top, but you are simply not there. That is a problem for you, since Google is presently the only engine that will follow your dynamic links. Fast says they will do so from October. I don't know if it is the Flash intro pages starting the show or the way the links to your navigation panels are created. You may wish to investigate and address this problem (which you share with almost all of your competitors and all major hotel chains by the way - so there is money to be made here.)

Back to topic: There is a lot of nicely written copy with fully formed sentences on your hotel pages - completely unique for each hotel - so my thought of using a script to generate non-English fact-sheet type content won't work. Pity.

You seem to have about 250 words on each property, so translations are likely to cost you $15-20 per page. Multiplied by 13.000 pages that will come to $195.000-$260.000 per language for the whole thing. Still, with that kind of site, it might well be worth the investment and should not be shrugged off. I assume you receive commissions for bookings, so translations could make a lot of sense.

[Great1]

Renke,

Glad you liked the site.

I'm aware of the problems we are having with Google. Believe me are in there (5,500 pages at time of writing). The site isn't really optimized for UK Hotels. We have pages for counties, towns and hotels, that are all optimized. Also, we have many different domain names.

Anyway, I think you're right, we will benefit from being able to provide different languages, and I look forward to getting the green light from the powers that be. I shall certainly be using the information I've found in these forums.

[Topcat]

Interesting problem you have Great-1. I'd like to have a look at this in detail. I like Rencke's idea of using a standardised boilerplate but also understand the problem. We are in the design, globalization and optimization business as a combined effort of the three (different, and expert) disciplines. On the translation side, tools such as Trados are used to build up databases of common-use terms for each project. This cuts down the translation time and also, therefore, cost. There may be an application variant here worth looking at. Can you let me know the site and I'll check it with this in mind. There may still need to be a trade-off between completely stylized copy and translation but if this gets the pages translated and indexed AND generates revenue, you could look at using that to justify full stylized copy later. This might well bring the translation cost down to $10 per page or less.

TC