International foreign language SEO questions

[IrvCo_Interactive]

I'm looking to add some foreign language pages to a website and have a lot of international SEO questions. I think the overall question is can you do SEO yourself if you are a native English speaker for a language you don't speak (like Chinese)?

1. How do you go about doing keyword research for a foreign language? What tools are available?

2. How do you know what search engines you should optimize for in a different country? And where can you find the technical SEO requirements for each? I'm wondering things like title tag length for Baidu. Or is the Title length different for Yahoo Japan vs. US? Do you write titles and meta tags in Chinese/Japanese for respective countries? Etc.

[LynnPatchett]

HI,

Generally I find it is very difficult to do SEO for foreign languages if you do not have a native/bilingual speaker on your team. Sure you can get a professional translation done which may be proper in its language use, but if the terms you are targetting are even somewhat competitive then your chances of ranking are slim. To compete you would need all the normal signals associated with good rankings (inbound iinks, social signals etc) in your chosen language and this is really pretty much impossible without a native speaker and someone who is familiar with the language, country, customs etc in question (I wont even get into the issue of getting incoming leads in foreign languages that you cannot support or getting a user to the site in one language and then insisting on communicating in a different language... not ideal!).

For keyword research the google keyword planner is probably still your first point of call for any language, but if you do not speak the language... what kind of insight are you going to get??

Just my two cents, but for me if you don't speak the language and seriously want to target a foreign language... find a native speaker to help!

[gfiorelli1]

Hi!

First of all I strongly suggest you to check this wonderful deck on Slideshare by Fernando Maciá. That deck will answer many questions your asking.

Then:

1. Can you do SEO yourself if you are a native English speaker for a language you don't speak (like Chinese)?

No! You cannot. Consider to hire a native interpreter to help you, if not a good native SEO

2) How do you go about doing keyword research for a foreign language? What tools are available?

As Lynn said, Adwords Keyword Planner and (Google Trends) are a good start. But I would use these tools by Baidu, which is the most used search engine in China:

• Baidu Keyword Tool ;
• Baidu Index (equivalent to Google Trends)

The best is using all three... and for that you need a native Chinese speaking person.

In this article you can find useful tips and links about keyword search in Chinese.

3) How do you know what search engines you should optimize for in a different country?

Use StatCounter.com for understanding what search engines are used in a specific country. The short answer is:

• Google is worldwide used and substantially dominant in every country
• Baidu in China is dominant
• Yandex in Russia is dominant
• Seznam is not dominant in the Czech Republic as it was once, but it still owns about the 20% of the search market share
• Naver (47%) and Google (44%) dominate in South Korea
• In Japan the 35% of the Internet users search on Yahoo!

About SEo for Baidu you can check this guide, which is not perfect but could be considered a good start (aka: do your homework too!).

About SEO for Yandex, I suggest you to dig into this site by Anna Oshkalo. And don't forget to read everything of the Webmasters' Guidelines of Yandex itself.

As far as SEO for Japan, this essential guide can be a considered a good primer.

About Naver, check this great starter post on WebCertain.