Getting foreign users on your website
If you've had a website with any level of success before you'll know that occasionally you'll see a surge in traffic from a Czech website, or a Chinese domain - which offers you very little insight into what they're saying about you or indeed how they found the site in the first place. Typically these surges of traffic are in the direction of content that is understandable for most languages - graphs, charts etc. However, the often overlooked notion is that there's a largely untapped 60-70% of internet users who don't have English as their primary language. How can you reel these people in?
Making Understandable Content
You have a few clear options available to you - it's always going to be worth writing the occasional bit of material that can be summarised in a chart because above all else, internet users are lazy. You have around 5-8 seconds to amaze us upon reaching your page before we're reaching for the back button. Charts are a great way of not only summarising your content for those with English as a primary language but they're also fairly accessible for other nations too. So that's a good starting point, but surely you can do more?
Indeed you can, the real trick is to get the actual content translated into the most common languages (which I see as being English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Portuguese).
The real trick to this is how the dickens do you get it done?
How do you actually get your content translated? There are some fantastic options available (as well as some not-so-fantastic ones).
The single greatest solution has to be WorldLingo who allow you to create a custom language pack to accompany your website. The best thing is that the translated versions are index-able by Google and bookmark-able - which is key for webmasters. Essentially, you place a set of translation links on your website and the scared foreign user is nudged gently into the arms of a familiar language... The translation is automated so it won't be perfect but it seems sufficient. The downside of course is the price - it's $15 per month per language - so things could get very expensive very quickly. WorldLingo also offer a human translation service but they can be found fairly easily elsewhere should you wish to empty your bank account.Now that we've covered the most comprehensive solution available, what other options do you have?
Google Translate is ok as far as free solutions are concerned and while it is awkwardly slow it does allow for bookmarking of the translated site but I'm unsure if they get indexed. You can have a look at the end result of Seopher.com being translated to French here and while the Article pages have performed well, the homepage is utterly borked - which would be utterly unsuitable (if it weren't for the fact that a Seopher.com redesign is just weeks away...). It fudges up some of the styles too but for $0, what reservations could you have?
Altavista's Babelfish has been around as long as I can remember - certainly since learning German in high school and now provides a 'translation box' for your website which does the job but carries with it a set of negative effects. For one, you have to have the hideous BabelFish translation box on your website (see a sample, right) and their Terms and Conditions indicate that you cannot alter it in any way. Furthermore, all translations carry heavy Altavista branding (i.e. clicking on the translate button opens up a new window with an Altavista header and your translated content - which is inconvenient to say the least. Although, it is a free service so they are fully entitled to do it.Conclusion
So there you have it, three very reasonable solutions to bringing your content into relevance for users across the globe, allowing you to draw upon an all-too forgotten resource.
If you have any thoughts or comments on the matter - use the comments below.
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