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Excerpt: In one of my last posts, a reader raised in his comment a really intriguing question: “I am wondering if having a Google powered ‘Translate this Site’ tool at the top of a blog is even useful in terms of SEO.” Let’s first have a look at the mentioned application. Google Translate is a free statistical machine translation service provided by Google that can be added to your website so as to translate your pages into any of 59 languages (as of today). Contrary to traditional rule-based translators, it uses statistical translation, which means that it uses past translations to “guess”…
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Excerpt: I’ve decided to create a small series of little website translation tricks for the practitioners. This post in particular will discuss the use of localized file names so as to improve your international SEO. Why starting with this trick? Well, a fellow website translator has been asking me lately for some advice, and at a certain moment he asked why I was insisting so much on link verification. Finally I realized he was not aware that for proper SEO translation I also translate the website file names so as to improve the search engine ranking of the translated site. First, some SEO…
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Excerpt: Website localization should be straightforward. No worries here, content is still king, independently of whether it is written in English, Spanish or Chinese. So if you provide content in different languages why should your fear the mighty Google and its algorithm changes? Your multilingual SEO efforts will pay off, and you will survive in the SERPs. Or will you? In January, Google promised that it would take action against content farms that were gaining top listings with “shallow” or “low-quality” content. Said and done. Google rolled out in February the so-called “Panda” algorithm (also known as “Farmer”), which impacted…
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Excerpt: In a previous post (Keyword Basics) I explained what keywords were, what the term long-tail keywords meant, and how to target keywords on-page. I intended to discuss on this post off-page keyword targeting, but based on a discussion on the Digitalpoint forum I decided to explain first the absolute basics of search and traffic volumes. Why? Very simple: Off-page keyword targeting is much more expensive, and we cannot simply rely on the number of searches to identify how much we want to spend. The very first thing I would like to highlight is that the number of searches is misleading. If…
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Excerpt: A Spanish reader of this blog whose English is just so-so wrote me to complain about the horrible grammar & wording I used on my blog. Now, that was a real head-scratcher, but a few mails back & forth (in Spanish) clarified the issue. As this person was not very good in English, he had used some machine translation tools, and the results were really funny. For starters, my post about how To Be Smart and Rank #1 Locally was translated into “Be Smart and Fetid #1 Locally”. I post here the link for those of you who speak Spanish, so…
