Google Improves Multilingual Support with Markup
Today, online competition has forced website developers and owners to provide content and services in multiple languages. The idea is clear. Website owners do not want to miss out on the opportunity to exploit a non-English-speaking audience. There is yet another scenario where the website owners must provide alternatives within the same language. A typical example is English, which is written in slightly different ways in different countries; America, the UK, and Australia are some of those countries that have their own unique style of writing. Google's recent announcement for a new markup for multilingual websites has therefore come as a boon in disguise for companies providing SEO services. These companies can now breathe a sigh of relief. So, what does that mean for these companies? Well, many business websites provide different versions of one language to different English-speaking countries, which results in duplicate content. This is bad for SEO and subsequently for a website's overall ranking with search engines. The new markup will help such websites, especially.com websites, which cater to the audiences of several English-speaking countries. With the new markup, the SEO issue is sorted out to a large extent. This in turn translates into better ranking. Below is a typical markup for a common language, available in different flavours, typically based on geographic locations. <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”eng-us” href=”http://www.example.com/” /> <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”eng-uk” href=”http://www.example.com/uk/” /> <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”eng-au” href=”http://www.example.com/au/” />By specifying the alternate URLs, it is a signal to search engines, informing them about the various options or versions on a website. There is yet another goal that is accomplished with the alternate tag. SEO experts are able to consolidate signals for these pages and serve appropriate versions, especially in content searches. Once the regional subtag is used, Google knows that the page is being targeted for a particular region. Annotation is yet another way to address web pages that are developed in a common language but in different flavours. Multilingual SEO, on the other hand, provides SEO solutions for websites that are served in different languages all together. SEO agencies follow the same search optimisation rules for all languages. These rules simply need to be fine-tuned for each language to satisfy the search engine's algorithm demands. An online marketing agency is an entity that fine-tunes these multilingual websites for search engines. It is a difficult job, but these entities have their task cut out very well. These people first create a list of frequently used keywords that visitors use to find such websites. This is one of the toughest jobs because the English language might have several synonyms for a word while a foreign language might have just one. Another aspect that makes the job of multilingual SEO experts dicey is the sample size of such keywords; it is typically very small. In such a scenario, alternate methods have to be adopted. These pages have to be optimised for multiple variants of a particular word.