Have a Site for Each Language

Have a Site for Each Language

Many hucksters sell some translational cross-submission products that are complete bunk. Essentially you pay them money to accept your check and nothing more. Search engines typically do not translate text on the fly when people search—it is too computationally expensive.

If you use automated software to copy your text into a different language, it is likely to read clumsily and turn people off. You are better off not having the text on the web if you do not have a person fluent in the language proof the final page copy.

If you have significant content and target audiences in different languages, then usually you will want to have a different subdomain or site for each language or major market. This will make it easier to get links from the different geographic or ethnic communities you are interested in without the losing focus of your site. It also makes it easy for engines to understand the clear divisions in your site.

  

Subdomains are best to use if you have a small amount of content about each market. If you have significant content for each market, it may make more sense to create a site for each market.

If your site is in an exceptionally competitive category and you have many links that would be hard to replicate, then you might want to use folders (or possibly subdomains) on your main site for each language instead of trying to build up the link popularity of many different sites.

U.K. English is much different than English in the United States. Even within the same language you may need multiple versions to cater to different dialects, customs, and tastes.

If your main site is a thin e-commerce site, or if it lacks authority, it might make sense to keep most of your authoritative content together with the low authority content. But if your site has great authority, then using a subdomain for some of your content should allow you to get more listings in the search results.

An advantage of placing some of your content on a subdomain is that if you have a strong brand and the subdomain is also authoritative, then when people search for your brand some search engines will feature both your domain and the subdomain at the top of the search results, and searchers will have to scroll a long way down to find competing sites or sites that are critical of your brand.

Any more than about two or three words in a domain name and it becomes less memorable. Some of the most memorable websites do a great job of branding by creating their own word: eBay, Skype, PayPal, Yahoo!, Expedia, Slashdot, Fark, Travelocity, Google…

However, most successful businesses are soft innovations; they may not be able to afford the time, money, and effort required to create, brand, and add a new word to our language. You can create a name that is well-related to something people already know. It is easier to market corn sugar than it is to market fructose.

If you are not going to develop a strong brand, then using keywords in your domain name may give you a competitive advantage in search results. Having your keywords in your domain name can increase click-through rates on search engine listings and paid ads as well as make it easier to get keyword rich descriptive inbound links.

If your brand is exceptionally strong and your content quality is second to none you still can rank well in search results after enough related resources reference your site, even if most references do not mention the keywords you want to rank for. Google’s search algorithms have moved toward pushing natural authority sites even if they do not have much relevant anchor text.

  

A keyword-rich domain name will make it easy to get inbound link text with your primary keywords in them, but don’t forget that your domain name also plays a role in your branding. Your domain name should have your branding in mind as it can help reinforce the ideals of your brand.

On the web there are many different business ideas or business models. If low cost is your business model, then you will find people who are willing to work for half your wage that will slash throats to get by on razor thin margins. It is not a way to enjoy life.

Someone can always do your job cheaper. For example, Google turned labeling images into a game. Now thousands of people are labeling images, for free, to improve Google’s image search relevancy. You can take a look at this process by visiting http:// images.google.com/imagelabeler/.

Branding is one of the most important parts of building any website or web-based business, and it is what allows you to establish healthy profit margins. Every Monday, Rob Frankel holds free branding clinics on his website. I recommend going to at least one of them and asking a question or two. He also wrote a great branding book by the name of The Revenge of Brand X.

The site is not seriously launched yet, but a cool domain name for a site about sleeping might be something like LikeABaby.com. Using a creative name makes it easier to build a memorable brand than just focusing on keyword phrases.

A guy I met did not have a large marketing budget, but wanted to market a video clip idea. I thought that it would be a great idea to use the viral nature of blogs to market the initial product (i.e., let the bloggers market the product for us by word-of-mouth, because word-of-mouth spreads like wildfire). I came up with the name BlogFlix.net. The site later went under after some technical errors, but within a few months of being finished, it was featured on popular sites such as Smart Mobs.