Multilingual newspaper website

[cubictulsa]

Hello all. This is my first post to seomoz.

My group is in the process of creating a website for a newspaper client which will have stories in two languages Spanish and English. Basically visitors will receive the Spanish version and have an option to read the story in english. I have never optimized a website for multi-languages/foreign languages. The newspaper is located in the USA so I'm not sure how this is going to work, which is were you come in. They would like to show up in both Google.com and Spanish versions of Google. My questions are:

1. Do I need to worry about ranking for both versions?
2. How should I go about optimizing the website for multiple languages?
3. How do I need to configure my pages to be indexed so duplication is not an issue? (Canonical URL Tag?)
4. Do I need to use special tags besides the news Google news tags for index, etc?

I have more questions but as you can see I'm looking for a starting point on how I should apply my knowledge of english only websites to a website that has the same content just in different languages.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

[tylerfraser]

1. Yes, you need to worry about rnking for both.

2. Get hosting from inside the country. Get the right tld. Get links from inside the country.

3. If it's in a different language you have nothing to worry about with duplicate content.

4. Definitely keep an eye on the tags that google gives you to assist you in properly categorizing your newspaper's site.