Multiple Translations on a Wordpress Blog

[MasonInteractive]

Hi,

If I wanted to have multiple translations available on the following wordpress blog: Packageforwardingservice.com. What would be the best strategy? Use a plugin or use a subdomain such as spanish.packageforwardingservice.com?

If the second option how would I add the translated content? install another version of wordpress on host?

Thanks!

[mrdavidingram]

Hi Tony,

There are a few ways of going about this.

The big question to ask up front though, is what is your aim of having the multiple languages? Is it simply to provide your content in an alternative language to assist your existing visitors, or are you hoping the new language pages will attract visitors from foreign language search?

Depending on your intent, the method I would recommend would be vastly different.

Thanks,

David

[MasonInteractive]

Hi David,

My intent is hoping the new language pages will attract visitors from foreign language search. We want to target latin american countries and will translate to spanish and portuguese.

Thanks!

[mrdavidingram]

Hi Tony,

In that case you definitely wouldn't want to be using a translation plugin, as you want to have permanent static pages that can be indexed by the search engines.

If you want to geo-target specific countries with the multi-language content, then personally I would  suggest using mirror sites on localised TLD's.

However if you wanted to keep everything on the same site to leverage the domain authority, then I would suggest sub-folders rather than subdomains so yoursite.com, yoursite.com/es etc etc

Cheers

David

[MasonInteractive]

Hi David,

How would I setup the subdirectories on the wordpress blog? also how would the content be posted?

Thanks

[mrdavidingram]

Hi Tony,

Depends how you wanted to do it. There are two simple ways of doing it:

1. Submit the new pages as Posts, and give them a category (ES,DE), then set your permalink structure to /category/post-name

This might mess with your existing URL structure set up though.

2. The alternative way around this is using custom post types, so creating a custom post type called 'es', and any post submitted in it will automatically have the structure /es

There are other ways to do go about it, including multiple Wordpress installs, although it all starts to get a bit messy.

Cheers