A common topic we often discuss with clients is their website ranking. They come to us saying they are not getting traffic and are not sure about translation as how will the know if the translated site will get traffic as well?
STAR can help you with your international web traffic, but lets just look at English websites for now as its the perfect starting point. SEO and web ranking is a bit of a black art, there is magic and there is some science involved. However the average user can get some basic information themselves to gauge whats going on. One such free system is Alexa.Com.
Alexa.Com is own and managed by Amazon.com so you know they have a good reputation. Its not 100% perfect so you have to take it with a pinch of salt as they say in English.
Alexa tracks users who use their system (free toolbar etc) to search the internet. So its a measure of how popular your site is within their users.
So the good side is, is that the system is consistent – you get consistent results from a portion of the internet users worldwide. For any good webmaster or SEO guru that is good enough for you to track whether your traffic is improving or not. You should track this every month and see how you are doing.It can take up to 90 days for some web changes to impact your SEO ranking.
Did you know it typically takes about 90 days for any major change to your website to appear on Google
To use the system you just go to the site rank page and enter your websites URL.
It will tell you roughly what keywords are being used to find your site, how many inbound links you have and your overall traffic ranking.
Next time we’ll discuss multilingual SEO and how STAR can help you deliver your website the right language to drive more business to your website.
In Matt Cutts latest video on Google search engine optimization he warns Google will penalize sites for over optimization.
The next generation of the Google Search Engine will analyze sites that have been heavily optimized. The idea is to level the playing field for all web users.
If you are doing global business you have to make sure your own website is visible and you need to understand the competition. Everyone knows Google is number one in the world – but who are the other big players?
Here’s the Global Top 10 internet sites.
1. Google.Com
Yes as expected Google is the world’s number one search engine.
The website replacing our TV’s. More video content is uploaded every day to YouTube than the entire global TV production output. YouTube is the new TV.
Earlier this month Google officially announced that it was “deprecating,” and phasing out, its “Translate API.”
This means that website developers will no longer be able to use the code that makes Google’s translation algorithms automatically provide translated language material for other websites.
The standalone Google Translate site will remain. This allows you to enter text or URLs for translation for translation.
Google put the decision down to an overuse by Spammers of their system to translate spam and phishing emails which are sent on a regular basis around the world.
It was announced as follows:
Important: The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011. For website translations, we encourage you to use the Google Translate Element.
Yesterday myself and Damian Scattergood attended Enterprise Ireland’s Social Media Club event http://bestconnected.enterprise-ireland.com/update-on-ei-social-media-club/ held in East Point Dublin. The seminar which started at 12:15 and ended at 2:00, opened our eyes and gave us new hope and ideas for STAR Translation. The hot topics at yesterday’s seminar included:
Establishing an internal governance strategy to build relationships online through social media
Identifying the best social media tools and platforms
Carrying out global communications on a small budget by using social media
Successful B2B social media marketing
Patrick Murphy the CEO of SiliconCloud, Ed Grant the CEO of MXSweep and Naylla Kassam the Marketing Manager of MXSweep started off with the main presentation, Also Dr. Theo Lynn, Director of the DCU LINK Research Centre, and Maeve Desmond, gave a short presentation on the power Social networking sites ( twitter etc..) have on companies and how we should use this power to bring more traffic to our websites without it costing us an arm or a leg!
The Localistation Reserach Centre and Symantec Ireland are pleased to announce the 2011 LRC Best Thesis Award, sponsored by Symantec.
The LRC Best Thesis Award is an annual award given to the auther of the best research publication in an area relevent to internationalisation and localisation.
Students who have completed a thesis on a revelent localistion theme within the past two years are invited to submit their work to the LRC for consideration. Theses may be submitted prior to their degree award and will be judged by a panel of academic and in-dustry experts.
The winner will receive €1,000 and one of Symantec’s professional retail products.
The scope of the entries for the award need not be confined to a technical linguistic area, and applications are also invited from students who are carrying out research into com-mercial and management aspects of the localisation industry.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
Localisation Workflows
Crowd Sourcing in Localisation
Global Web Design and Content Management
Machine Translation
Computer Aided Translation
Terminology Management
Internationalisation and Global Software Design
For more information on the awards visit www.localisation.ie or email LRC@ul.ie
Proposals may be sent by email to LRC@ul.ie
Or by mail to:
Localisation Research Center,
CSIS Department, University of Limerrick,
Ireland
Did you know that according to Google, a majority of users surveyed felt that having information in their own language was more important than a low price?
Google works hard to show users the best possible search results. Often those are going to be pages that are localised for the user’ s location and or in the user ‘s language.
If you’re planning to take the time to create and maintain a localised version of your website, making it easy to recognise and find is a logical part of that process.
Google Webmasters post series takes a look at what is involved with multi-regional and multi-lingual websites from a search engine point of view. A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in various regions (generally different countries); we call it multilingual when it is available in multiple languages, and sometimes, the website targets both multiple regions and is in multiple languages.
