Carlo one of the readers of our blog has asked us some tips for getting better results in the field of SEO , for multilingual sites . Specifically, his problem is with the SEO geotargeting on the same domain consists of multiple languages.
In this post you will find a step by step guide to solve the problem and get a better ranking in different languages.
Let us take as an example the work done for a client, who has a domain . com in which the ‘ Italian is the main language , but then as for most of the websites that cater to more markets, it also has four other versions site in as many foreign languages.
The descriptive content of the pages has been fully translated in each language and the content is physically located within a folder structure quite simple, for example: nomesito.com / FR / for pages in French, nomesito.com / de / for German and so on.
You may think, mistakenly, that this solution is enough to prove to Google that the content of each folder corresponds to the language indicated and so, following the logic shown in the example above, all of this is enough to get good results on search engines like google France, germany google, etc.. In fact, often it is not so, because of Google.fr Google.de as well as on those pages are not able to get the right rankings, because Google sees the site as targeted on Italy .
You might answer that you simply buy domains specific for the countries in which you are interested. Beyond the fact that this solution has several problems at the level of development, it is not so simple because in some countries like France you can not get a domain with a. Fr until he proves to have a seat in site. In some countries it is even worse. In Norway, for example for. No, not enough to have a physical location but you need to have at least £ 10,000 as capital.
For these and other reasons companies usually should encompass all within a single domain . So we thought of a way that would allow us to help Google understand that, even with only one domain we are actually working on the SEO for different countries and different types of users. The solution was simple enough, there was enough to load XML sitemap for each separate language and set the Geo targeting in Google Webmaster Tools for a specific country.
This solution obviously works only for domains that are not geo-specific such as:. COM,. ORG,. INFO,. NET etc.. the method therefore can not be used to type domains. en or. de and so on.
These Detailed Instructions to Accomplish:
Create XML sitemap for each separate specific content of each country. For example nomesito.com / EN / and all the pages in that folder are on an XML sitemap, which is nomesito.com / EN / sitemap-en.xml . To do this more quickly you can use a XML sitemap generator . After that create another XML sitemap for all the pages relating to other languages, such nomesito.com / FR / for the French language and so on.
Go to Google Webmaster Tools, click on the ” add site “and enter the specific URL includes the folder of the language, for example nomesito.com / EN /
Then check the properties of the website by inserting a meta tag or ftp upload a html file in the root of the server.
Once your site is verified you can go on the main area of webmaster tools and click on the site you just added.
Once the dashboard click on ” Site Configuration “and then” Sitemap “. Now add the URL of your sitemap XML specification in the box, for examplenomesito.com / EN / sitemap sitemap-en.xml just add-en.xml.
After loading the sitemap you make the geo targeting. Return to the dashboard related to this part of the site, click on ” Site configuration “then” Settings “
In the settings page you will find the drop-down menu for ” Geographic Destination “where you can select the specific country for that sitemap.
After this operation the Geo targeting Multilingual for the same domain is done! Clearly, if the site is composed of multiple languages and multiple subfolders then you will have to repeat all the steps several times.
I want to specify that this method is entirely proper has no contraindication and we at Secret Key after testing for several clients we have seen an overall improvement for each of the languages targhetizzate. You also test it and let us know if you have got benefits as in our case.
Author Bio: Ankur is the Digital Media strategist of SEO India Agency. He is also an active blogger and loves to share his experience and knowledge of the SEO India, Internet Marketing and reputation management.