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HTML

Posted by Grant Lacey
Grant Lacey
6,103 Points

Multilingual website best practices

Looking for a getting started series or a point in the right direction. google webmaster tools has a lot of documentation - it'd be great if I could find some helpful information from a web development point of view and of course SEO. Ultimately, it would seem most useful in my case to have all pages indexed for each language. It seems this would be helpful for SEO.

Id like to manually generate content for 1 or 2 languages as a start while having an option to auto-translate other languages.

1 Answer

Blake Hutchinson
Blake Hutchinson
21,695 Points

One thing I've seen multilingual sites do historically (and many still do) is have content for each language in its own folder and use JavaScript to detect the browser's language and redirect the page accordingly. At any rate, some people turn off JavaScript in the browser. One solution I've seen for multilingual sites is for the front page to give end users the choice to choose the language they want to view your content in. In HTML5 the html tag has a lang attribute which can be set to "en", "es", or whichever language the page content is in.

example.com/en-US/index.html

example.com/es-MX/index.html

One thing I would steer of is using online translation tools to do your translation for you.

Ready for website localization? 4 multilingual SEO tips to get started http://www.sajan.com/ready-website-localization-4-multilingual-seo-tips-get-started/

Multilingual SEO for global marketing: 4 tips for search engine glory http://www.sajan.com/multilingual-seo-for-global-marketing-4-tips-for-search-engine-glory/