SEO + Language Problem

[Rick_001]

Hi,
This is regarding language issue with respect to SEO work of the site. My client has developed a site using German language. His target customers are the people of German. Now he wants to do some SEO work of the site. The issue is some people of German use English key phrases in Google for seeking some information and some others use German language for this purpose.
Taking above mentioned things into consideration, please advise me how to tackle this issue? What I mean to say that he can use either German or English for web content, title and meta tags of the site but not both.

Hope to get a possible solution soon.

Thanks in advance
Rick

[janeth]

Originally Posted by Rick_001

Hi,
This is regarding language issue with respect to SEO work of the site. My client has developed a site using German language. His target customers are the people of German. Now he wants to do some SEO work of the site. The issue is some people of German use English key phrases in Google for seeking some information and some others use German language for this purpose.
Taking above mentioned things into consideration, please advise me how to tackle this issue? What I mean to say that he can use either German or English for web content, title and meta tags of the site but not both.

Hope to get a possible solution soon.

Thanks in advance
Rick

Set up a sub domain name and do one language for the main site and the other language for the sub domain name.

[cw1865]

Originally Posted by Rick_001

What I mean to say that he can use either German or English for web content, title and meta tags of the site but not both.

Says who?

Actually there are many English/German cognates.

The only difference in the charachter set is the a,o,u with an umlaut and the double s

The only question I would have is whether Germans actually type the a,o,u with an umlaut or would they they just type ae, oe, ue (or ss for the double s), or even for SEO purposes, whether it even matters. I think Webnauts would know the answer to that one.

Other than that the only reason why I would think they would be typing in English phrases is because they happen to be highly bi-lingual in English and for whatever reason are searching beyond the results they found in German.

[pablowerk]

I currently manage a German/English site. I don't use a sub domain, but rather just a www.domain/de/ for the pages in German.

With regards to the umlaut's... Just searching through my stats, we get far more hits using the umlauts vs typing in the appropriate ae, oe, ue, ss.

The only time I believe they might use these substitues is when they are entering a URL. You run into all sorts of problems using special characters in your URL's - so it's best to use the substitutes for filenames.

[iaccess]

I would set up a German language site and an English language site, and put a clear and easy path between them. That way you can target English terms on one, and German on the other (using the proper German characters). If someone who speaks German uses the English terms, they can easily navigate to the equivalent content on your other site.

I would strongly urge you to use a .de TLD (top level domain) for the German content, since country-specific TLD's get better rankings in the search engines (especially Google), and you can use the respective search engine webmaster tools to specify market, language etc. Second choice would be a www.mydomain.com/de/ section of your .com domain (note that Google now lets you specify country/language targeting for directories). Subdomains would be my third choice -- none of the advantages of a .de domain and you diffuse your linking by adding another domain.

Another thing to consider is searchers who use a mix of English and German. Here you may need to include some English terms that are commonly mixed this way in your German content.

[dominoman]

Either set up a subdomain, as suggested above, or create some entry pages. These should still be quality pages, not just lists of keywords, but will direct traffic to your site which you can then use to point back to the original page.

[alextj]

Hi Rick,

I can second iaccess - we do the same with an Italian and English website, with the English version in a subdirectory and it all works very well in ranking in both languages.

There are only 2 things you should watch out for - for the English version of marketing, emails, etc make sure you have an easy URL for them to type in instead of www.example.de/en but rather .com for example - they will invariably forget the /, just ignore the URL, or end up at the German version and leave without bothering to look for the language change link.

The second thing is make sure that if they land on an internal page and click the language change link that they go to the equivalent page in the other language and not back to the homepage - even with very clear and good navigation nobody wants to wade through your site to find where they were at.

All the best,
Alex

[Rick_001]

Hi,
I would like to thank everybody for their valuable inputs. Taking all your suggestions into account, I have two viable options at hand.

1. Creating two different sites (one for German and one for English). I think this is the best option as you can clearly strategize your seo work. There will be German and English specific file names, title and meta tags and web content. At the same time, one can clearly make it easy for search engines to understand the web content without any ambiguity.
My only concern: Duplicate sites issue. I know both are in different languages but for an example is not possible for Google (using its translation tools) to know it. Please clarify my doubt.

2. By creating sub domains. I will be happy if anyone can give some practical examples. I mean sites which are online.

Thanks in advance again,
Rick

[Jean-Luc]

Originally Posted by Rick_001

My only concern: Duplicate sites issue. I know both are in different languages but for an example is not possible for Google (using its translation tools) to know it. Please clarify my doubt.

Google is very clear about this. There is no duplicate content between a page and its translations.

Jean-Luc

[Peter (IMC)]

If those words are commonly used in the german language, then just use the english words within the german text and mix in the german words as well. If you really want to focus you could write 2 pages to target each phrase in the correct language. But both pages should be in german of course.

Just because a foreign word is used in a language, doesn't mean you have to make the whole text in that foreign language. I doubt that the germans searching for that phrase want to specifically find an english text.

[Rick_001]

Hello everybody,
Thanks again for sharing your views. Just to confirm again, I have asked my client (German) to go ahead with two different sites. One in English and other is in German. I have decided to work out seo strategy separately for both sites. As all of you have unanimously emphasized in this case no duplicate site issue will come into picture, accordingly I have given green signal to my client.

Thanks,
Rick