Expanding your website to more languages
Posted on: November 28, 2014
Google recommends and encourages the use of site expansion through using new and more languages based on the user’s country or geographical location. Language variation in web pages could definitely improve the chances of potential consumers navigating and browsing your website especially in cases of international searchers and online users.
Video Highlights
Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead of Google, discusses in comprehensive and useful details the importance and impact of expanding your site particularly the best practices to incorporating new languages or geo-based language variations. Google Webmasters provide information for site users with the goal of making and improving their web page to make it SEO friendly through expanding to country-based or new language variation.
- Users are given the pointers on how to configure their sites to be search engine friendly and properly use international site signals such as rel=”alternate” hreflang which indicates that the page has relationship to an alternate language version at a specified URL.
- Google emphasize the potential search issues regarding language expansion particularly having two very similar URLs displayed in search results causing confusion to users.
- Site users are advised to have self-reflective discussion with their team or company before embarking on the language and global expansion. For instance, they must be committed in terms of creating, reviewing and maintaining their online written page content for various site users.
Important points to take note of your website:
- Know and understand the importance of expanding to new language and global site configuration to cater to customers in new regions with different language use.
- Learn how to properly use international signals recognized by search engines such as the rel=”alternate” hreflang.
- Determine significant and potential search issues which you must avoid and to ensure high quality results for your country-based and new language expansion.
