How do you optimise ranking with foreign language search engines?

foreign search engines

[Ciskut]

Hi there,

Could anyone please tell me how a website (to be more specific a museum website) can improve its ranking when visitors use
foreign search engines?
I’d be interested in knowing what are the best practices to consider either when visitors are using English keywords or just their native language equivalent.

Many Thanks

[Quadrille]

You'll be competing with sites rich in the SEs native language. To attract visitors who use that language, you'll need content in that language.

And not machine-translated, or you'll be wasting their time and your bandwidth.

Before you consider attracting people whose native tongue is not yours, you need to answer the other question: "what will I do with those visitors when they get here?"

[Ciskut]

Hi Quadrille, thank you for your reply.

You're absolutely right, considering that the museum attracts people whose native tongue is not English the website already provides contents in different languages.

My question was more focused on those visitors who actually want to find what's on at the museum - to plan a visit or just browse the collections on line - but are not sure how to spell the museum's name or the the exhibitions themes and artists properly.

Thanks again for your help.

[Makaveli2007]

Hi Ciskut,

I hope this doesn't sound like I'm making fun of it, but 'think of what those visitors would search for'. That's basically the rule. Try to find keywords that those people would/might be typing in. And in this case, I assume you probably can give the very best reply to your own question, because you know your target audience better than we do. Probably not the reply you wanted to hear, but it's true :-). You have to find search terms they might type in to find your site - and what search terms those might be..youll be most likely to know. For example you already figured out that they dont know how to spell the museum's name or the exhibition themes, etc. properly..thats something we wouldnt have known but u have. Im sure if you concentrate deeply you can find something they might type into a search engine to find you!:-)

Or..you could do a survey and ask the right people what they might type in to find you, if you can pull that off in some way.

[Ciskut]

Hi Makaveli,

No worries, I'm new to the SEO world so I know my limits and I'm happy to get any advise :^)
I have a list of search terms people type in to find the museum - which I got through Google analytics an Google Trends - and I was wondering what are the next steps, basically how to use these findings to get better results out of the search engines.

Thank you for your help I really appreciate it!

[angiolo]

Content in the targeted language is the first step.

Depending on the language you are targeting, you could consider few other steps:

- When possible, buy a local domain ( for German for example a .de domain ) and look for a local hosting

- If you do not like to buy local domain, you can have more languages using one of these possibility:

a) subdomain ( for example de.yoursite . com )
b) subdirectory ( for example yoursite . com/de/

It helps a lot to differentiate your languages....

- Try to get few good links from "trust" sites in the targeted language ( for example if your targeted language is German, look for German sites; those sites should be in theme with your text link...).

[Lord Majestic]

I think you will definately need local domain - usually non-global SEs simply the task of indexing by only focusing on domains in their own language, since they can't usually crawl the whole web this means they focus on their own TLDs and sometimes on other sites that have backlinks from those TLDs.

You will definately need content in that language too.