The best hits in every language

An appealing design and a great user experience are essential for a successful website. However, so-called search engine optimisation, or SEO, is essential for ensuring that your carefully crafted content is subsequently found. This prepares your website, in terms of technology and content, to achieve the best possible results in the chosen search engine and, ideally, appear at the top of the hit list.

A clear structure, internal and external links, short page loading times and clean code form the technical basis for this. That said, the content in particular offers scope for optimisation that should not be underestimated.

Top priority here goes to the composition of your texts. They should be current, unique and relevant. Using so-called keywords will ultimately make your texts discoverable on the web. The principle less is more applies here! Excessive keyword density or repetitive content will have a negative impact on your website’s ranking. So, always spread your keywords around carefully.

This of course applies to all languages you provide on your website. Extra caution should be exercised here though: Simply translating the list of German keywords for example will seldom deliver the desired results. This is because cultural and linguistic aspects strongly influence your website visitor’s search behaviour. This is true even though the same search engines are used in every country. Google is in fact the front runner in Europe but in the USA, Bing and Yahoo also hold quite a significant share in the market and in Russia and China, Yandex and Baidu are among the favourites. Multilingual search engine optimisation (MSEO) thus requires more than simple translation.

There are essentially two options for MSEO projects. If there is no keyword list as yet in the website’s primary language, these can be researched and determined in the respective foreign language directly. If the website has already been optimised for your primary language, the existing keyword list can be used as a basis for translation. These translated keywords are then checked for their relevance in the target language, ideally by a qualified native speaker.

Whichever method you choose, an overall strategy should always be devised from the outset which takes into account both the circumstances and the preferences of the respective target market and also ensures that the relevant experts are on board. oneword works closely with SEO-experienced partners worldwide to reliably achieve the best (search) results for you in any language.