Spanish Sites..What?

Help

[cfurr44]

What i understand is that spanish sites are view completely different from english sites and by building a spanish site I could get traffic from the spanish speaking internet population? If this is true...What a great idea. C

Can someone tell me the fact on this?

[fidibidabah]

Generally speaking, yes. See, spanish speaking people will generally use spanish search engines or spanish versions of english search engines which only search spanish pages, to find pages in spanish, generally.

[caspita]

I'm building mi site bilingual (spanish/english) providing a link on the main menu for both indexes (actually it is a dinamyc php based on a url parameter, so, the same index.php for both, defaulted to english) .... are the search engines going to catch this automaticaly or do I need to provide some special tag or meta-tag to indicate the language?

Thanks.

[cfurr44]

Is there a program or an easy way to translate my site into spanish or do I have to have it done?

[jimbeetle]

Hey cfurr44, fidibidabah and caspita,

Welcome to WW.

cfurr44, any translation program provides not quite good results at best. If you use one somebody will have to go over and correct the translation anyway. Best bet is to hire somebody to do it from the start.

And be sure to keep your audience in mind. For the broadest possible Spanish-language audience you probably want to use as pure Castilian as possible; if the audience is more targeted, then be sure to get somebody who can translate into the specific dialect.

Jim

[firstmark]

The problem with Spanish language sites is advertising and affiliate opportunities. There aren't as many opportunities there. Its a pretty noncompetitive field search engine wise though compared to English. This goes for a lot of non english languages. Now when Google starts to offer adsense to non english sites specifically like Spanish ones, then there might be more real reason to research this further.