Jadehat, the SEO consultant

While waiting for Gengo’s developer to release version 0.9.1 for me to install it here, I’m going to share you with nice SEO trick for content sites. It is no secret, and was probably published before, but many aspiring SEOs don’t know of method to multiply quantity of your content tenfold without much work.

Let’s say you have a small niche site with fifteen content pages. You create a subfolder on your site for German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese etc versions, then go to the Google Translate (you can use other automatic translation engines to widen your language choice, translate each of your pages into each of the languages, and upload results to your site.

New pages get indexed, rank high for non-English terms, and voila - more visitors come from the search engines. Right?

No, not exactly. There is one mistake, which is done by most novices that attempt this method that can turn this useful trick into a huge mistake, and I’ll teach you how to avoid it.

You got your key terms all wrong.

While you don’t care about grammar, mild nuances and subtle vocabulary errors that machine translation will give you, you’re in big trouble if your main keywords get messed. For example you target keyword ’search engine optimization’ and you have some articles about it. Google Translate translates search engine optimization as Search Engineoptimierung, which is, obviously, rubbish (BTW, Google search for this phrase turns impressive 65,500 results). If you use it in your text, users searching for Suchmaschinenoptimierung (which is correct translation of SEO in German) find nothing on your site.

To evade such pitfalls, research translations of your main keywords and substitute machine-translated terms for them.

How to find correct translation? Hire a native speaker? Find friends that speak this language?

Of course, not.

Just head over to Wikipedia and go to the article about term that you need to research. In the bottom part of left sidebar, you’ll most likely see list of article in other languages. Visit these pages, and you’ll know that in Japanese, search engine optimization is 検索エンジン最適化 (and not サーチエンジンの最適化 as Google Translate says), and mortgage in Portuguese is hipoteca, not mortgage.

So, autotranslating your pages can give you quite a boost in visitors from non-English speaking countries… but always, always check your keywords there. #1 spot for Search Engineoptimierung just won’t do you any good.