Multilingual Websites

One of the most challenging issues to website owners is to globalising their website for international audiences. Language can be described as the main barrier to entry on the internet. Related issues can be identified as well. For example, web owners need to find out which domain extension is most appropriate, how incoming links can be obtained, and how to structure a website for multiple countries under a single domain.

There are actually no hard and fast rules in creating a multilingual website. In most cases, multiple testing needs to be conducted to come up with the right formula. Geo-targeting factors should be studied if you want to go international. In essence, website owners end up with three (3) choices including:

Country-Level Domains - many international website opt to get country-level extensions. For instance, their Australian website might have a suffix of ".com.au" while its Chinese equivalent might have a domain name of ".cn". The content on the web page are still the same, albeit in a different language.
Subdomains - in this case, the web master have chosen to keep all multilingual pages in a single domain name. Using subdomains will differentiate the pages for one country over another. This method is a good alternative to country-level domains.
Country-Specific Directories - here, the website contains country-specific directories on the home page. In addition, certain countries have two or more widely-used languages. Directories give people an option to choose which language they prefer under their "Country" field.

Making websites multilingual is definitely part of doing business in today's environment. But it is also a fact that many countries have the same language, most notably English. As a result, you might end up with duplicate content. Google and other search engines don't encourage the "hiding" of the said text. Instead, you can canonical tags on the duplicate version.

If you are interested in pursuing multilingual websites, contact MultilingualSEO.com.au today. We can make sure that your website stay relevant in the eyes of user and search engine, no matter what language it's written in.