Creating a page in German

One page translated from main site

[trillianjedi]

I've had a friend do some German translation of, what is in effect, a help page relating to how to use a particular widget.

We also have Finish, French etc.

I have a couple of questions:-

1. When I build these pages, is it advisable to use the language tag? Do search engines utilise this tag and does it help with, for example, google geographic listings (so using that tag to tell the spider that the page is in French for example, would help for a google.fr listing?).

2. Is there any advantage in putting the language code in the URL (eg: widgetywidgets.com/widget-help-de.html)?

3. Anything else I should consider?

Many thanks,

TJ

[davidpbrown]

Yes use the lang tag.

I don't know have a measure but it can only help bring sense to a multilingual site.

To be on the safe side, I'd suggest putting Finnish and more exotic languages into encoding UTF-8 and suggesting that in the headers as there can be some confusion if UA invokes the wrong font. This especially in European languages where a-z+acents.. get mistaken as other a-z+acent.. characters.

(When doing UTF-8 check it's not UTF-16 as some text editors default to this.)

dpb

[trillianjedi]

Thanks David, I'll do that.

Also I've now found this useful reference thread:-

[webmasterworld.com...]

TJ