Top Tips For Multilingual Keyword Research

Keywords have always been an integral part of a website’s functionality and visibility, helping to draw searchers to a company’s online world. When going global with several multilingual websites it is important to tailor the keyword research and optimization strategy to each language in question.

Simply translating what already works, usually from English, rarely achieves the best results. The terms people use to search vary from language to language (naturally), as well as from culture to culture. Investing time in researching and understanding your new customers’ keyword preferences and their culture will maximize your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and ensure it is attracting traffic.

So How Do Keywords Work?
Keywords match the content in a website with the terms or phrases being used in search engines. As people search for a particular product or service, the websites best matching the ‘search criteria’ are listed, with the most relevant (and best optimized) appearing first.

Naturally, every website wants to be at the top of that search list (search engine results page, or SERP) and getting there requires a combination of different SEO strategies. Working the right keywords into a website’s copy is the cheapest and most effective way to increase online presence, and it applies to all websites in all languages.

Choosing The ‘Right’ Keywords
The process of identifying the ‘right’ keywords for a website can seem counter-intuitive. Rather than using technical product terminology, people tend to search the web in more day-to-day terms.

Online tools, such as Google AdWords, are great for identifying key search terms. A search for specialist tea, for example, brings up 1,300 hits; however, a search for fancy tea brings up 6,600. Where Google AdWords excels is in pointing out that special tea – not a million miles away from the first search – produces over 18,000 searches. Making the tiniest of tweaks to a website’s copy can have an impressive impact on a website’s SEO.

Google AdWords is also great for identifying market competition. Despite being almost three times as popular in searches, special tea has less than half the amount of competition that fancy tea does; so which phrase would a tea vendor best use on their website? And the principle can apply to any sector or topic; knowing how consumers search is just as important as giving them the content they want when they get to your website.

Multilingual Keywords
Exactly the same principles apply when creating a website in another language. Working with a professional localization and internet marketing agency is worth every cent and highly recommended. Simply translating a crib-sheet of English keywords is not enough, and foreign language internet marketing agencies provide the vital cultural insight and the language skills needed to guarantee optimization across all your target languages.

Key phrases can even vary between countries sharing a common language. For example, in Spain, coche is commonly used for car, whereas in Latin America, it is used for a baby-stroller. Losing potential business for such a simple mistake can be a major optimization problem.

Current and Creative Content
Keeping your website content creative and up-to-date is a given for any successful website. Blogs and news sections are great avenues to keep the website current, as well as to boost its SEO. Keep abreast of issues both internationally and locally (in the target cultures), and work the relevant keywords into topical articles; their currency helps the website’s search engine rank position and the keywords help to attract interested consumers.

Other Important Keyword Rules
Once the ‘right’ keywords have been identified, they should be incorporated throughout the website. Google prefers a keyword density of around two to four percent, so apply the power of one to your keywords; once in the title, once in the description, and once or twice within the article…and in the URL as well. But as with everything, less is more – you should aim to optimize each web page for no more than two keywords. Articles that read like a hit-list of keywords are not only boring for readers, but can be flagged-up by search engines as spam.

Honing the content of your website through a few simple language choices can truly maximize its search engine performance, and the effects can be seen surprisingly quickly!

About the author:

Christian Arno is the founder of Lingo24, one of the world’s fastest growing providers of translation services. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over forty million words for businesses in every industry sector, including the likes of MTV, World Bank and American Express. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24

The Internet Marketing King is Back!

For the few of you who haven’t already noticed, the king of internet marketing, Grizzly Brears, is back in full force! After several months of not posting on any of his main make money online blogs and a couple years since any real regular updates, plus getting one very popular blog deleted recently, he now has 3 blogs he has been writing on the past month or so.

* Grizzly Brears – His newest one that contains all the old posts from his highly popular “Make Money Online for Beginners” blog that was recently deleted. There’s a ton of great information here already and I am sure more will be added over time.

* Internet Marketing Lessons – Another new one that I know will grow to become an incredible resource.

* Make Money Online with Griz – This is one of his older blogs but he has finally started updating it again.

I know a lot about internet business and SEO but he puts me to shame. I’ve learned more about internet marketing, blogging, search engine optimization, and making money online from him than I have from everyone else combined in the almost 8 years I have been an online marketer.

He has been truly missed by me and many others. Let’s hope he sticks around this time!

Dedicated to your success,
Trent Brownrigg

How to Use SEO to Your Advantage

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fancy term for a very simple concept – getting high rankings in the internet search engines to gain lots of free targeted traffic from them. It’s a very important internet marketing strategy. Utilizing keywords in your website content is one of the first steps for getting high rankings in the top search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. However, improper use of SEO terms can actually have a damaging effect on your website’s ranking on these search engines. Here are some tips to keep in mind…

Have Valuable Content

Search engines prefer to pick up content that has been written by a human instead of being pre-generated by a computer. You want to write content that not only contains the proper keywords, but also contains actual value for your readers. This not only gets the visitors to your website to stay longer, but it also gets you a higher ranking in search engine listings.

You don’t want to overdo it with SEO terms either. Every page on your website should stick to one general topic so that you can plan out two or three keyword phrases that would best describe the topic. Look at the most frequently used search terms for your topic in order to get the best possible SEO keywords to use in your content. Having multiple web pages with various related keyword phrases for each can help you to spread your presence on search engines and help your visitors find the information they are looking for.

Links and Title Tags

Often, people tend to forget about the other areas of a website that can have an effect on their rankings. The words you use when creating a link are often picked up by search engines as being keywords for your site. Use your SEO keywords in links to improve your search engine rank. Linking to other parts of your site can also improve your overall traffic.

The title at the top of a website is known as the title tag for that page. Adding keywords to your title tag is another good way to optimize your website for search engines. Your title tags will double as a description of your website for search engine listings, so you want to make sure they contain the best keywords and a solid explanation of the page’s content.

Know Your Visitors

Web sites receive visits from people from all around the world, which is why seo writers need to utilize multiple keyword phrases to get the best search engine results. Not every person searches for something using the same vocabulary. You must know who your target market is so that you can better plan your SEO keywords to target the demographic. Using social tools like polls, forums and other interactive venues can help you get feedback from your audience as well as provide entertainment that will keep them coming back after their initial visit.

You can often use programs to track your site visitors in order to see which days you have the most traffic, which search terms have the most hits and where most of your website’s visitors are coming from. By using this data, you can plan your content accordingly to achieve the best results possible.

SEO keywords can help you to attract more visitors to your website via the most popular search engines. The trick to using them is to have valuable content and to insert two to three keyword phrases naturally in to every web page. Links and tags also have an effect on your rankings, so be aware of how you use them. It is important to learn about the people who are visiting your website and plan your SEO content accordingly.

This is a guest post written by Corry Cummings. He is the owner of Content Customs — A content creation company that specializes in high quality web content writing services.

Using Web 2.0 Sites in Your Link Building Strategy

A basic definition of a “web 2.0 site” is as a website that is not static and allows users to interact with each other as well as contribute to the website’s content instead of passively viewing the information. Some examples include; social bookmarking sites, social networking sites, web based communities, wikis, blogs, video sharing sites, and more.

These Web 2.0 sites offer great opportunities to use them as part of your link building strategy for your own website or blog. It’s well known in the internet marketing world that building links to your site will help with your search engine rankings and bring you a lot more traffic. It’s also no secret that you should diversify your backlinks instead of using just one or two strategies. That’s where these web 2.0 properties can come into play.

There are virtually endless ways to use these sites to help boost the rankings of your own site, and below are a few good ideas to get you started:

1) Squidoo Lenses

Squidoo.com is a very popular place for sharing information through the creation of mini-sites called “lenses” and it is one of the most popular web 2.0 sites. A lens is a one-page website on a specific topic. On that page you can add relevant articles, embed videos, photos, products, and all sorts of other things. Of course, you can also post links back to your own website or blog.

They don’t allow all topics so check to be sure your topic is allowed before you get too far into creating a lens. If it is, create as many lenses as you like, each of them sharing good information along with links back to your website and/or blog.

2) Hubpages

Hubpages.com is another extremely popular web 2.0 site that allows you to create one-page websites but they are called “hubs” instead of lenses, and they aren’t as flexible as Squidoo. Hubpages requires you to use 100% unique content – you can’t use previously published articles or PLR content. What you can do is rewrite your articles so they are basically brand new, or pay a writer to do it for you if you don’t have the time. You are allowed to put links back to your own sites but do it in moderation.

3) Blogs

You might already have a blog but there are many different blogging platforms where you can create more of them to use in your link building efforts. Blogs are typically considered to be web 2.0 properties and you can use them for creating plenty of backlinks to your main website/blog. Some free platforms you can use are wordpress.com, blogger.com, livejournal.com, blog.com, xanga.com, and many others. The most common approach for this type of web 2.0 property is to regularly keep adding fresh content, and have relevant links leading back to your own website or main blog.

Private label rights (PLR) content also works well to help keep these blogs active. You can either modify the content to make it more unique, or simply use it as-is. But I do recommend re-writing it at least a little bit. If the content includes keyword phrases that go along with your topic, turn them into anchor text and link them back to your main sites.

You can also use free reprint articles by other people. Simply go to an article directory like ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, or articlecity.com and pick a few articles that go along with your topic. Post one or more articles a day, including a link back to your site in the post. Be sure to keep the original author’s bio box with a live link to their site – you aren’t trying to steal the content, only use it to keep your blogs active, which is perfectly fine.

Okay, now you have 3 ways to use web 2.0 sites in your link building strategy. Start with those above and then expand into some of the countless other web 2.0 properties that are out there just waiting for you to use them.

3 Ways to Build Backlinks to Your Website

The term “backlinks” is used in internet marketing to mean links from other websites pointing back to your own, or incoming links. They are also often called “inlinks” or “inbound links” but they are all the same thing. Why are backlinks important? Because the more incoming links you have pointing to your website, the higher relevancy the search engines give to your site in relation to the keywords that people use for searches.

For example, if your site features information about internet marketing (as this one does) and people search online for “internet marketing strategies” then you want your website to be listed in the first spot – or at least one of the top ten spots, if possible (hopefully mine will in the near future). One good way to accomplish that is to build plenty of incoming links using the anchor text “internet marketing strategies” and similar phrases. Anchor text means turning the keyword phrase into a live link so it looks like this – Internet Marketing Strategies – as opposed to using a standard URL format like this – http://intmktr.com – or whatever your domain is.

The HTML code used to create an anchor text link would look like this:

<a href=”http://intmktr.com”>Internet Marketing Strategies</a>

If your website features high-quality information, it’s possible that people will link to your site naturally, but you’ll still want to do plenty of link building yourself too. There are plenty of ways to do this, and below are three popular way to build backlinks to your website:

1) Article Marketing

There are hundreds of article directories online that are happy to allow a link back to your website in exchange for a quality article on your topic. Using the example above, you could write articles sharing tips on all sorts of various internet marketing topics, and in your author bio box include an anchor text link back to your website. If you write and submit plenty of articles, you’ll be building plenty of quality backlinks.

2) Social Bookmarking

Bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Delicious.com, Stumbleupon.com, Mixx.com, and others allow you to post links to your favorite sites, and your own can be one of them. Many of these are nofollow but some of they are dofollow, and they all help to an extent. Even better, if other people like your site they can bookmark it too. If you offer high quality information, you could even enjoy a bit of viral linking as people pass your link around.

3) Satellite Blogs

Beyond your main website or blog, you can also create smaller, niche-focused blogs that feature your articles and several anchor links back to your main site. Some of the better known blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress are easy to use for this purpose.

When possible, try to create backlinks on websites that rank well in the search engines. A link from a site with a Google PageRank 6 (PR6) will carry MUCH more weight than a link from a site with a PR0. The more popular and older the sites you can get a link from, the better.