View Full Version : Adding Chinese pages to English Website
lasvegascom
12-29-2005, 06:51 PM
I am doing SEO for a company. They have asked me for some advice on adding a some Chinese pages to their website. It is an American company which already does business with Chinese companies. But they want to do some promotion online in China. They have already have the content translated to Chinese (by someone in China).
I have a few questions:
1. They want to link to these Chinese pages from their English pages. The link would be in Chinese. If they do this, will this cause all users to receive the install Chinese language pack pop-up? Would they be better off making the link an image of Chinese characters?
2. What would they need to do in order to optimize these Chinese pages for the Chinese search engines?
I am just advising them on that part of the process. Are there any other issues that they should be worrying about?
mcanerin
12-29-2005, 09:56 PM
1. There are 2 types of Chinese characters - simplified and traditional, so make sure you link to the page with an indication of which version you are using, and which encoding method (Big5 or GB). You can use an image for this button, which won't force a language pack download.
2. Anyone looking for the Chinese page will probably already have the appropriate language installed in their browser, so don't worry about that part - you only have to worry when you mix and match the languages on the same page.
3. Make sure that you set the language version in your HTML:
This:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="zh">
Tells the browser or screen reader which language to expect.
And this:
<html lang="zh">
Tells the search engine or visitor what language this is in. (zh is Chinese).
You should use both, since they do different things.
For SEO purposes, the standard rules apply - text not images, spiderability, etc.
Good luck,
Ian
Olney
01-02-2006, 12:51 PM
You may already know this but
certainly encode the entire site as UTF-8
Andy AtkinsKruger
01-04-2006, 03:35 AM
Chinese is not easy and you're going to need the support of a specialist.
mcanerin has mentioned the different characters sets (simplified and traditional) - traditional being used in the islands (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan) and simplified being a Mao invention used in mainland China.
However, there are more levels than that - Chinese is mainly input into computers using Pinyin - an alphabetic system invented again by the Chairman. And China has been using a telegraphic number-encoding system to number characters and therefore communicate for many years.
'Chinese' search engines deal with these issues best (hence the success of Baidu) and equally Chinese search marketers can work their way around the issues most successfully. So outsource is my advice! :)
mcanerin
01-04-2006, 03:38 AM
Hey Andy - you going to SES Nanjing? (speaking of outsourcing..)
Ian
Andy AtkinsKruger
01-08-2006, 03:01 PM
Hey Ian - I might make it to Nanjing - it all depends on Mrs Atkins-Kruger as she has promised to bring a new multilingual search marketer into the world just around then :).... but I'll be in NY. Think this post might need moving to events & organisations though....?
Andy
1. They want to link to these Chinese pages from their English pages. The link would be in Chinese. If they do this, will this cause all users to receive the install Chinese language pack pop-up? Would they be better off making the link an image of Chinese characters?I struggled with this on several English sites. How best do you link to the language sites? My compromise has been to use graphics of the characters for the links from the English site to Japanese and Chinese sites. This will prevent any problems for your English site visitors. Make sure to use the appropriate alt tags for the images.
You may already know this but certainly encode the entire site as UTF-8That's debatable. UTF-8 is still considered problematic in China. The recommended encoding for Chinese sites to ensure the widest possible accessibility is still to use the gb2312 charset.