translating your website

There are many reasons why your web site shouldn't be all in English. Much of the world surfs in other languages. Spread your reach by becoming multilingual. I'm not saying you should translate your whole site into 10 languages but having one or two pages in another language can get exposure outside the US.

Ideally you want a professional translator. Second best is a friend or relative who's a native speaker. Those who studied for a year or two in college or spent a semester abroad is next. But by far the quickest and cheapest way is to use online translation servers.

While not perfect and far from fluent, translation servers can provide you with simple text in another language. Keyword-rich pages with unambiguous, straigtforward language is what you're after. Think complex phrases instead of in-depth paragraphs. Write clearly in short chunks so that the translation servers won't have any problems.

There are several approaches. Feed the same couple of paragraphs into one or more translators and use the ones that are the most different. Remember: one gets penalized by search engines for duplicate text so aim for different text. Another approach is to rewrite your content twice, resulting in three slightly different versions. Feed each version into a different translator.

Step one is making sure you use the correct HTML language reference tags so that your pages display correctly. You may have to install fonts on your machine too.

These techniques can be used for title, keywords, and description as well as body text. Remember to keep the text short and simple, much like a child's book. The more sophisticated and obtuse the original language, the less useful the machine translated text will be.

Use Google Analytics and any log analysis software your ISP provides to track your visitors' language and location in order to judge how effective your non-English authoring efforts are.

Good luck!