The Home Page Dilemma

[theBPC]

Hello, All,

I regularly have to create sites that are bilingual. I have seen some sites created with both languages on the same page. However, I always advocate having separate versions so keyword density is not diluted - plus it is WAY easier to read!

My dilemma is the home / splash page - Our standard practice is to put an se optimised intro in both languages on the home page. From there the visitor can select his or her preferred language and procede. However, I'm concerned that isn't the best approach.

One client has recently asked for a remake of their homepage. This company is highly dependant on traffic to their site (they cater to foreign tourists), so anything I can do to boost their site's rank is important.

Suggestions??

[seobook]

enough inbound links with the right anchor text can get you ranked for about whatever you want. also many people suggest seperate websites or picking one language (your primary target consumer base) off the start and then giving the other as an option.

[rbester]

Promoting the same site in two different languages is very close to promoting two separate sites. The keywords are different and so is the competition.

As for suggestions.. I blieve separated homepages is the best solution - which means that the homepage title will be in the matching language of the page, and the site will have 2 URL's for link building purposes. Many here agree that the location of where the site is hosted and the domain ending can improve a site's ranking in a country specific Google, so you may want to consider completely separate sites with local hosting and local domains.

[bwelford]

I agree strongly with the two web page approach, particularly for the majority of your human visitors. A splash page just gets in the way of most folk getting directly to the web page they really want to visit.

With Google currently, given its emphasis on backlinks, it may be possible to get a minimal splash page to have reasonably good rankings. However this is not true for Yahoo! with its greater weight to content.

[Nacho]

Sometimes the two webpage approach is not the best, when it comes down to conversions. Believe me, "been there . . . done that". It really depends on what you are doing and the focus of your site. Let me explain . . .

For example, If your site webpage talks about "books" in general, then in Spanish it would be easy to have a different page that talks about "libros". HOWEVER, here comes the tricky part, if you are in retail and talking about specific products (for example: DELL 300m, Palm T3, or any brand), then you don't want your English users getting into your Spanish site first and have conversions be very poor. Yes, your Spanish pages will sometimes rank higher if you take this approach.

Usually portals with rich content and very high competitive keywords do really well with the two webpage approach and retail sites (depending on each case and level of competition) usually work really well with one bilingual page. Many companies usually don't want the bilingual approach because they want to target the general market and let the others adapt.

If you are retail site and can encounter these types of issues mentioned above at the end of the second paragraph AND really want to go with the two page method, then another trick you can do is to have the English site receiving all the navigation and linking, and that page with a link to the other language page with minimal internal inbound links and with a "NO INDEX" meta tag.

Again, this is just one example of a single alternative, but there is NO "one size fit's all" approach. All sites are different, all multilingual target markets are different and all users are different, so why come up to agreement on this thread to do it with one method?

How about, let's talk about the different approaches that can be taken and the possible benefits and/or conflicts to taking each approach.

[bill]

there is NO "one size fit's all" approach. All sites are different, all multilingual target markets are different and all users are different, so why come up to agreement on this thread to do it with one method?
I could not agree more. The approach I take in Japan is completely different from the approach I take in China...etc. There are different realities in each market to work with. It's great if you can do local domains and a local hosting account, but that's not always feasible or necessary. I think one of the reasons you need a forum like this is that the are so many differences in each market that you need to hear from people with experiences in those markets. If it was as easy as setting up a list of guidelines I'd think someone would have done it by now ;)

[Alavina]

I think, two seperate pages is the best solution for you. You'll get the right page for humans (that's your main aim, presumably), and your worries about keyword density are no longer substantiated. Of course, add a link to the other page ;) .

[Kal]

Great advice everyone. I don't have a lot of experience with multilingual sites, but the way I've seen it done most often (e.g. airline sites) is with an initial gateway domain that either:

a) captures their IP address automatically and whisks them off to the appropriate regional site content

or

b) lets the user choose their country via a drop down list and then whisks them off

Unfortunately, neither approach allows for much optimization of the HP, but at least you could optimize each of the regional landing pages?

[Denyse]

I'm starting to come around to the separate URL and page idea, but I face an uphill battle with customers who complain about having to put two URLs on their business cards, letterheads etc, not to mention having to pay SEO in two languages. And don't say they should have separate cards for each language... in a completely bilingual society that does not wash because you don't necessarely know which language your customer is most comfortable with (not to mention a little thing like the "Office de la langue francaise" the french watchdog in Quebec)

My customers see alot of those english/french splash pages out there - mainly for political correctness, they like the splash page directing to different languages.

Because there does not seem to be a concensus in the business about this issue, when I propose the two web site idea, I can see the customer thinking I only want him to do this to line my bank account, and fill my portfolio.

[bwelford]

Bonjour, Mme. Référencement. I really like that signature, Denyse.

On your last point, your customer having two separate domains will not put any more money in your pocket, unless you're doing the hosting as well. You will need the same number of web pages either way. However what they will win in selling-effectiveness terms far outweighs the small costs of buying the other domain and hosting it.

On your bilingual issue, I come down on the other side of the argument. My advice is always to have two versions of everything. Bilingual versions are always awkward and really keep no-one completely happy. How much better to receive a welcome and have contact entirely in your own language. I think you win in effectiveness and rarely are worse off.

To illustrate with some made-up numbers. It may be that for your market niche here in Montreal, your potential clients fall into one of the following four categories.

A. Only understand French - say 40%
B. First language French but understand English - 25%
C. First language English but understand French - 15%
D. Only understand English - say 20%

Of course a small proportion in the A group may get offended by receiving anything in French, and conversely a small proportion in the D group may get offended by receiving anything in English.

So you guess which language they might prefer and I would bet that you would usually guess right. If you do some maths on this, you will find that you're serving the large majority of people in a better way by doing this.

Of course in the "old days", when you had a large amount of printed material, there were substantial costs in having two versions of everything. Now with much in electronic format on the Web, the additional costs are minimal.

One final footnote on this issue is that in a multicultural city like Montreal, there are many for whom neither English nor French is their first language. So they are happy to receive communications in either language. :)

[rbester]

Because there does not seem to be a concensus in the business about this issue, when I propose the two web site idea, I can see the customer thinking I only want him to do this to line my bank account, and fill my portfolio.
Sometimes customers need to be educated. As a professional SEO you are responsible to examine the site and its competition, then, if you find that the best way to go is two separate sites, that's what you should recommend the customer to do. Give him his options and convince him why the option you recommend is best. In most cases it is a fact that promoting the site in search results for two languages is the same like promoting two different sites. The SEO have to do everything twice: keyword research, optimization, link campaign, PPC campaign etc. The homepage is only a small part of it.

In many multilingual sites there are simply links to the different languages available from the homepage. For example visit wikipedia.org and scroll to the bottom. The visitor is able to easily select his preferred language. Very simple and elegant solution IMHO. A visitor arriving from search results will most likely land on the homepage of his language - so if he searched for "encyclopedia" he would find en.wikipedia.org" and if he searched for "encyclopédie" he would find fr.wikipedia.org.

In addition, if the visitor landed on the wrong home page, say a French speaker landing on an English page, a visible "Français" link will do the trick. It is possible to add a cookie that remembers the visitor's language selection so the next time he is visiting he will be directed to the language of his choice.

[strategicrankings]

I have the opportunity to work on multilingual sites very often too, since i'm from a bilingual country (english/french). Very often the clients want to have their website in english and french version.

Here all official documents are in english and people speak mostly french than english although we have a huge historical british background.

Anyway our approach so far has always been to land the visitor to the english version of the site 1st and provide a drop down in the header where he/she can choose the french version of the current page.

Since spiders do not crawl drop downs we always include a text link in the footer of each and every page that link to the other language version of the current page.

So we have catered for both the user and the SE.

Hope this help.

Riley

[Andy AtkinsKruger]

Interesting discussion. There's also the question of the target market - geographically speaking. When you target with a particular language you can significantly affect the geographic situation.

Let's say you're creating a French site. Are you targeting France or Belgium or Switzerland or all of them? For businesses this is an important question because of product or service back-up.

What we've found is that your French-for-France site can rank significantly better in Belgium - than your French-for-Belgium site - and this is often because the Belgian site is taking a bilingual or even trilingual approach.

The solution for the complexity of multilingual targeting (besides links) is to create three sites - one that is a selector site or mini portal - perhaps based on a .com which decides between the two or more languages - and then to have dedicated sites for each language. Otherwise it's going to be more difficult to compete for rankings.

And when it comes down to cost - in my experience this simpler approach tends not to cost more - compared with the alternatives.

I also think it's easier on the users too!

Andy

[ldelgado]

Interesting discussion indeed.
I'm also beginning to optimize a website (one domain) with a splash page and two languages. I'm currently focusing my SEO on internal language pages but I'm also a bit concerned about how to approach the splash page because the client really wants to keep it. I've read all the opinions above but still, I have some questions.

First, the website details:
Market: Boat and Charter rental
Languages: English and Spanish (both under a subdirectory)
Initial Splash page with links to both versions.
One domain.

And now the questions:
- What should be the best choice in the splash page? Metatags with mixed keywords (english and spanish)? A paragraph of small text for each language? Both?
- When it comes to indexing, should I provide the domain.com or should I submit the two language URLs separately (domain.com/uk and domain.com/es)?
- Does it make more sense to create two subdomains for the two languages? Won't this affect current pagerank?

Many thanks.

[kenpomachine]

I have worked for a site that has a bilingual supermarket. The way to go in Spain with these sites is doing a splash homepage where you choose the language. They had at first a script that drove people in the region of the second language go automatically to that language and we got a lot of complaints. And the site is built in a way that doesn't allow separate SEO.

But as you say you have the two languages in different folders, the way to go would be to treat each folder as a different site and build links accordingly.

FWIW, my personal websites have never been hosted by spanish companies and nonetheless I get the most traffic locally, from the search engines, both are .com domains so one would think that traffic would be share almost equally with South America, but no. I think search engines also rely on the country of the whois registrant to decide whether a site is relevant for a certain country.

[Jorge]

My solution is to use different domains (local) for each language except in those cases where I cannot get a local domain, surprisingly being in Spain makes it no easier to get a DOT es domain. For those languages I use a subdomain. So far so good. I haven't seen any loss of keyword density or anything of the sort for having different languages in one domain.